Are There Any Student-Tracking Systems That Use RFID and Text-messaging?

A private school in Mumbai is seeking a solution for its students. The school will stick an ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) tag on the back of every student ID card. As each student enters the school gate, the UHF reader should read his or her tag and send that child’s identification data to a main server. The server should then automatically send an SMS text message to the mobile phone of that student’s designated parent, stating that his or her child has entered the building at that particular time. When the child leaves school, the system should again send an SMS message notifying the parent that the student has departed, along with the specific time. My question is this: Do you know of any company that sells such a solution?

—Name withheld

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We’ve written about a number of schools that employ UHF EPC Gen 2 RFID to track students (see Tagged High School IDs Improve Student Flow, Enforce Rules) and other types of passive or active tags (see Northern Arizona University to Use Existing RFID Student Cards for Attendance Tracking and Missouri School District Puts RFID on Buses). None of these applications, however, exactly match the one you are considering.

That said, we have covered a similar application that utilizes AeroScout active tags to do what you are trying to accomplish (see RFID Watches Over School Kids in Japan). I would bet that the integrator wrote the application that sends the text message, and that this is not an out-of-the-box solution. So the answer really is that no company, to my knowledge, sells a solution that does exactly what you are looking for.

If any of our readers are aware of such a solution, please post information below.

—Mark Roberti, Editor, RFID Journal