RFID Journal Staff asked 11 years ago Is it possible for an RFID tag to pick up information from a server that hosts dynamic information and display it on a screen, based on a specified condition when the tag is near a reader? For example, if the server contains reviews of a product fed in by customers, when the product's RFID tag is near the reader, the screen would display the most recent review so that a person could read that review and then decide whether or not to buy it. Is this feasible—and, if it is, how would it work?
—Nikita
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Dear Nikita,
Radio frequency identification transponders communicate with a reader (sometimes called an interrogator). The reader receives information from a tag and also writes information to that tag. The device communicates with back-end systems via application programming interfaces (APIs). So if you wanted a particular tagged object to show reviews related to that product, you would need to associate the tag's unique ID number with a specific product and related reviews. The best way to do this should be determined by programmers who can assess your existing systems and create an efficient API. But here's how it could work:
Let's say that your company has a Web site with product listings, and those listings feature reviews from customers who have bought the products—apparel, for example. You could place a large monitor on the sales floor with a PC, which would be linked to a passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) or high-frequency (HF) reader. When someone brought a product over to the monitor, the interrogator would read the tag's unique ID and forward that data, through the API, to an application that that would then look up the related clothing in a database and display the appropriate Web page featuring reviews for that garment. This is a pretty simple and easy-to-execute application of RFID technology, in fact.
—Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal
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