RFID Journal Staff asked 11 years ago I have a customer in Saudi Arabia that is a newsletter distributor. Its delivery staff must visit every customer and deliver the newsletter every day. We need a way to ensure that the staff does this for every mailbox, which is outdoors. Is there an RFID solution that would work for our requirements?
—Ahmed (Khobar, Saudi Arabia)
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Ahmed,
It is certainly possible to use radio frequency identification for this purpose. It would require placing a durable Near Field Communications (NFC) transponder on the box and employing an NFC-enabled mobile phone to read the tag. Each tag would be associated with a specific box, so when a tag was read, that would confirm that the newsletter was delivered to that box. Data confirming that the tag was read and the newsletter was delivered would then be transmitted by the cell phone to servers in the cloud.
InfoChip offers a solution that does exactly this for the oil industry (see InfoChip Markets Signal-Boosting Add-on HF Antenna and RFID Phone App). That company's technology allows workers to call up information on a tagged asset, but I'm sure you could also utilize it for your needs.
—Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal
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