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RFID Tattoo for Tracking Cattle and Humans
ack154 writes "The Register reports that a St Louis based company, Somark Innovations, has successfully tested RFID tattoos to be used for tracking cattle and other animals. Details are limited for the actual tattoo, but it's said to contain no metals and can be read up to about four feet away. Engadget has some more details on the matter. And yes, the article does mention RFID tattoos are possible for people, specifically the military. From the article: 'The system developed by Somark uses an array of needles to quickly inject a pattern of dots into each animal, with the pattern changing for each injection. This pattern can then be read from over a meter away using a proprietary reader operating at high frequency.'"
My guess is that it uses reflective glass beads injected into the skin with compressed air. The pattern could then be read with any electromagnetic wave that can penetrate a few millimetres of skin, eg microwaves.
Details are limited for the actual tattoo, but it's said to contain no metals and can be read up to about four feet away.
No metal? This doesn't sound like a radio transceiver at all. Can you make an electronic device without using any metals?
I wonder what it actually is. Glorified barcode?
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
Humans already have multiple tracking methods, fingerprints, dna, phermones, iris identification, and even facial recognition. Most of these aren't useful in tracking and identifying animals. In the past hot iron branding has been the major identification for cows and this is just the natural evolution of that tracking method. If only they can track e. coli laced food this way as well...
Ok, a couple problems here.
1) If you RTFA, you will note that the RFID tag is only readable from "Up to four feet away". Somehow I don't think that really counts as a great distance. You are going to notice if someone walks up near you and starts wanding you to get an RFID signal. In practical applications, the RFID tag is often (although not always) little better than a barcode tag due to interference from nearby radio sources and environmental signal blockage. This is a big reason why it hasn't seen widespread adoption yet. It costs much more than comparable technologies but only adds a small value.
2) In the case of regular citizens, I absolutely agree with you. But for Soldiers the RFID tattoo has a great advantage over the dog tag as it cannot be lost. If it is small, removable via inexpensive laser surgery, and placed on a couple different points around the body, it is useful for identifying bodies that have been badly mangled due to things like bombs, mines, and other explosives.
It also has an excellent practical application for use with criminals, both in prison and out on parole. If you place RFID readers at certain strategic locations, you can go a long way to detecting the presence of, say, pedophiles that have been paroled and are hanging out near a school (assuming you have hidden RFID readers near schools, of course.) Naturally, the law-enforcement uses are very limited, due to the limitations of RFID that I mentioned in the first point. But the uses for identifying soldiers are very practical, and I imagine that we will be seeing RFID used in that manner sometime in the very near future.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
While I disagree with this idea completely, the one thing I could see as a "benefit" for the soldiers would be to have scanners in the hospitals (mobile and permanent) as well as mobile scanners for medics. Might be useful if someone is badly injured or burned, can't find the dog tags (they blew away!) or something, perform a quick scan, and know that its Gunnery Sargent Hartman (the senior drill instructor!), he is allergic to penicillin, blood type 0-, and has a pin in his leg, so you can't put him through an MRI machine. Of course, you'd have to put it on the chest, or more than one location, in case of a missing limb.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Or it could also be used specifically to TRIGGER bombs, mines and other explosives upon detecting a particular group of persons, or even an individual that matches an exact code.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
This is not my sig.
At one time I did some work for a company that uses a purely passive (no battery) RFID inside the cow. They embed a temperature a/d device within a microchip RFID to provide identification along with accurate body temperature measurement. The device is packaged in a bolus that sits in the cow rumen. When the cow walks by a reader board the id and temperature is transmitted. The cool thing is that the device is energized by the reader board so that no battery is required.