Shares of Minn.-based Digital Angel have doubled since the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Dec. 23 announcement of mad cow disease. Digital Angel’s RF-ID tags, used to track livestock and pets, are suddenly hot.
“They have the only [Food & Drug Administration] and USDA-approved implantable microchip in livestock, explains David Talbot, director of Melhado, Flynn & Associates, a brokerage firm, and an investor in the company. “About the size of a grain of rice, it is injected under the skin with a syringe. This enables you to track the animal and take their body temperature remotely, from a distance of 20 feet away.”
The USDA, has, apparently, been contemplating an electronic-tracking system for livestock to help avoid the difficulties it now faces in investigating the mad cow outbreak in the U.S. The Animal Identification Plan is a nationwide tracking system expected to be implemented over the next three years.
The requirements of the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 and the Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) Act, may result in the use of RFID and other technologies to track food from its point of origin to its retail outlet. RF-ID requires no batteries. A resonant circuit is activated when a nearby transmitter is encountered.
Optibrand uses retinal scans of cattle to confirm their identity and uses readers with GPS chips to record the animal’s location. Optibrand, based in Fort Collins, Colo., announced a five-year deal Tuesday to supply its technology to Swift & Co., a leading meat producer, which may make the entire life of livestock more easily traced.
Paul Cheek, CEO of Global Technology Resources says they can track food down to its components. KSW-Microtec has also developed RFID tags for food products while Savi Technology combines item-level tagging with satellite coverage to track products globally.
Digital Angel’s Bio-Thermo chips will not only identify an animal but tell how it feels using temperature as a health indicator. The current method of rectal readings often stresses the animal, resulting in incorrect readings. The Bio-Thermo chip provides an easy way to take frequent readings - for monitoring the effects of medication, as an example. Digital Angel also plans to develop additional services utilizing the unique automatic noninvasive features of the system.
Beef producers have long used brands, plastic ear tags or tattoos to identify individual animals. But data collection is time consuming and prone to errors. Electronic ear tags automate the data collection. Electronic implants, the next step, provide a unique and inalterable form of identification. These devices can and will integrate biosensing capabilities.
Destron Fearing, associated with Digital Angel, makes ear tags attached to livestock and electronic microchips implanted under the skin of pets, fish, laboratory animals and livestock. Their microchips are used by Bonneville Power to monitor salmon passage through dams in the Pacific Northwest. Juvenile salmon are tracked and reported to a remote computer in less than 2 milliseconds. It does this while fish are passing through fisheries facilities of hydroelectric dams at speeds in excess of 20 feet per second
Fish farms like Dragon Fish Industries can certify that their fish were not acquired in the wild. Arowana, the fish they farm, is considered an endangered species.
Fish implanted with microchips and creeks wired with electronic sensors are part of an Oregon project to improve forest management.
About 5,000 acres owned by Roseburg Forest Products has been turned into an outdoor research laboratory that will track the movement of cutthroat trout and determine how much shade and fallen trees they need to thrive. RF-ID chips will be implanted in 600 fish. They will be tracked by 60 RF-ID readers along the creekbed.
More than 10 federal and state agencies, nonprofit organizations and private companies contributed $750,000 in cash and support for the project along the north and south forks of Hinkle Creek. The shady landscape is filled with typical second-growth forest and meandering water.
Biologists, hydrologists, forest engineers and consultants will study the movements of native cutthroat trout. Each fish is identified as they pass one of the antenna sensors or enter fish traps in the study area. Researchers also have placed 45 water-temperature sensors in the streams. Water-level gauges and solar-power panels have been installed to operate electronics.
“We really need to know how fish and water quality respond to modern forestry practices at the watershed scale”, said Dan Newton, Oregon timberlands manager for Roseburg Forest Products.
The 10-year project began in 2001, but it took nearly two years of preparation to begin gathering information. We are starting to accumulate a critical mass of data here, said an Oregon State University professor Arne Skaugset, a lead researcher in the study.
RF-ID using WiFi frequencies (2.4 Ghz) is now coming on the market. National Scientific Corporation (NSC) announced developer kits for its Wi-Fi Tracker tag hardware that ties directly into the Ekahau Positioning Engine. It will eventually be available in a tag or badge for GPS-like positioning info (and two-way data), indoors. Right now it uses an active transponder in a PDA-size device for GPS-like tracking information (without GPS). This might be useful in applications like the Portland Streetcar. ETA readouts jump all over the place because the Streetcar’s GPS reception gets reflected or lost between buildings. Using WiFi for positioning could result in more accurate estimated arrival times.
Bluesoft is deploying AeroScout Wi-Fi Tags which combine RF-ID with Wi-Fi compatibility and long battery life (up to 5 years). RF-ID in the Arm may be next.
Texas Instruments, an RFID company, suggests a possible scenario if a consumer carries the tag in a purse or wallet (implying a loyalty card): “The technology has the potential to tell retailers exactly who’s in their store at any given moment while offering full purchase histories for each shopper.” According to RFID Journal, plans to realise this potential are already under way. IBM sells RFID product tracking and inventory control systems.
MasterCard and American Express have been testing “contactless” RF-ID versions of their credit cards for more than a year. The cards need only be held near a special reader for a sale to go through — though the consumer can still get a receipt.
More information is available at MIT’s Autoidcenter.org, EPCglobal, RFID.org, RF-ID Journal, buyrfid.com, ACSIS.com, RFID toolkit, rfidtalk.com and nocards.org. WiFi Planet overviews RF-ID technologies.
Related Daily Wireless articles include Tracking RF-ID, Digital Angel, RF-ID: From Soup to Nuts, Tracking Ship Movements - And You, Homeland Insecurity, Marathon RF-ID Tagging and Port Security with RF-ID, Intelligent Transportation and Wi-Fi Birdhouses.
