The technology piggybacks on technology created by the Near Field Communication Forum...that will, for example, enable consumers to pay for goods using their cell phones (credit card information would be embedded in the cell phone) and use wireless RFID technology to connect to merchant and banking applications.
The idea behind the patent is that by combining RFID cell phones and RFID sensors with cellular networks or the Internet, consumers will be able to read any RFID sensor tag for almost any application. "We've basically created technology that allows cell phones to read an RFID tag and then tell the cell phone what it is, so the cell phone can read all these different technologies transparently," (John) Peeters (Gentag's founder and president) said. "That's important. [It's] a system where information can be in a [Gentag] database that's downloaded to a cell phone. You've seen Google [applications] that [tap] into all these master databases —you don't know that all this information just comes back to you. We're saying RFID phones are going to be active in the same way."
According to... Peeters, given the range of read capabilities in the cell phones—a couple of inches with HF (high-frequency) and a couple of feet with UHF—privacy should not be an issue.
Gentag is focusing on specialized diagnostic applications for its RFID reader patent, including a technology it has in development: disposable diagnostic wireless skin patches. The company currently holds "smart skin patch" patents for RFID glucose monitoring, cardiac monitoring, UV monitoring and a biomarker skin test patch.
press release | ExtremeNano
~You think 'wireless skin patches' will some day be used as IDs to keep track of hospital patients, prisoners, students and others? Maybe if superglue is used to make the patches less disposable?
When everything can be tagged and read will robots and driverless vehicles make use of RFID technologies to navigate?
Guides will no longer be needed for museums or for nature walks. Objects will literally 'speak' to us. So can places: buildings, trees and rocks. Depending upon who owns or controls access to the databases.
When RFID personal identification cards become common-place, will new laws be passed coupled with severe penalties and surreptitious scanning that will insure everybody, at all times, can be 'read'?
Posted by Stubbornson at January 1, 2007 12:34 PM