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.'"

Comments

Re:eh?

[mrogers]

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.

No metal?

[Cheesey]

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?

Re:Could have just said 'tracking cattle'

[d3ac0n]

A couple of brief reasons:

1: Barcodes can't be read at distance, without me knowing about it. If somebody, for example, tried to read a barcode in my passport, I'd know. I wouldn't know if somebody had tried to read a RFID tag in my passport.

2: I'm sure that if the article related to barcoding cattle and soldiers, you'd have received similar comments. To be honest, I don't want RFID or barcodes printed on me for the world to see.

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.

Re:Could have just said 'tracking cattle'

[Kozz]

... it is useful for identifying bodies that have been badly mangled due to things like bombs, mines, and other explosives.

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.