Oct/Nov 2006

The number of suppliers offering real-time locating systems, or "RTLS", has tripled in the past year, according to RFID research and event specialist IDTechEx, and is due to see very sharp growth in popularity in the next few years. IDTechEx says they will account for nearly half of all RFID implementations within ten years.

In the logistics world, RTLS applications might be appropriate for reporting the moment when a package passes a given "choke point". In the general community, they might be used within a hospital for sounding an alarm. The attraction, says IDTechEx, is that they can give quite precise location information, which may be absent from pure RFID- or barcode-based systems.

In the past, says the organisation, RTLS has consisted of very short range infra-red systems and complex, multiple-antenna, multiple-beam long-range RFID. It admits the concept appealed only to "an esoteric niche market", and says just 900 such systems have been sold so far.

So what's different now? According to IDTechEx, the change lies in the increasing availability of newer technology such as "parasitic" (and therefore economical) Wi-Fi locators and zonal RFID. The latter involves arrays of interrogators - perhaps in the ceilings of buildings - which ensure that the RFID tags are never out of range.

Major international technology companies are said to be keen to develop the concept, including Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Motorola.

* IDTechEx is behind the Active RFID Europe conference in London on September 19-20. More information in Events diary, page xx.