Frida Wagner asked 1 year ago I work at an advertising agency, and we're looking to develop a new product for one of our brands. This project uses RFID technology, and I want to be sure we're using it correctly. The idea is to have an RFID sticker or tag on a child's clothes and a reader connected to the kitchen stove. When the stove was on, the reader would alert the parent through a phone notification or alarm if the child was 1.5 meters nearby. The distance would be subject to change, but it would be at least 1 meter. My question is this: What type of RFID sticker and reader would I need, and how would the programming work?
—Frida
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Frida,
This would be a relatively challenging use case for UHF RFID, which is used in commercial deployments to identify when individuals with badges enter specific zones, and to then prompt an alert if they are unauthorized to do so. UWB and BLE technologies are each used in some safety applications to identify if two individuals remain in close proximity for a specified span of time, or if a human comes within range of equipment, such as a moving forklift.
Detecting when a child comes within 1.5 meters of a stove (when it is turned on, I presume) would probably require a battery-powered UWB tag worn by the child and a corresponding UWB device installed on the stove. One challenge for the technology would be the presence of the child's body, which would absorb RF energy and thus make the transmission less accurate.
An interesting technology from Novelda offers an option: a UWB-based human-presence sensor that would not require the child to wear a badge. The company's solution detects movement by sending UWB radar pulses, and its software can determine how close the movement is to the device.
Claire Swedberg
Senior Editor
RFID Journal
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