Month: April 2019

RFID Journal Live 2019

Oh the irony of human-entered data at an RFID conference. Ten years ago, Kevin Ashton, who coined the term “Internet of Things”, explained in RFID Journal:

We need to empower computers with their own means of gathering information […] without the limitations of human-entered data.

Case in point, the badge: the surname and given name are reversed, with the latter mispelled misspelled as a result of human data entry during onsite registration from a paper & pencil form. Nonetheless, this is an excellent example for emphasising the potential of RFID and the IoT!

Indeed, at the co-hosted IEEE RFID event, I, Jeffery Jeffrey, presented a workshop entitled Co-located RFID Systems Unite! focused on this potential now that there are nearly 20 billion RAIN (passive) and BLE (active) units shipping annually. An open architecture for collecting, contextualising and distributing the resulting data is becoming critical, and I was pleased to hear this sentiment echoed on the RFID Journal side by Richard Haig of Herman Kay and Joachim Wilkens of C&A.

Also heard echoed was the prevalence of BLE (active RFID) throughout the conference. Literally.

This contraption which converts radio decodings into musical notes may seem odd at first, but over the past year we’ve learned that art is a powerful tool for conveying to a non-technical audience the prevalence and potential of RFID and IoT in our daily lives. A few attendees were invited to listen with headphones and walk around until they found a silent spot. None were successful.

And we can only expect such prevalence to increase with energy harvesting technology maturing. We were pleased to see Wiliot’s live demo of an energy harvesting BLE tag, making good on their objectives from last year’s conference. Inexpensive battery-free BLE will be key to RFID proliferating to all the physical spaces in which we live, work and play—the BLE receiver infrastructure is often already there.

Which came first: the RFID or the Digital Twin?

The concept of the Digital Twin has also taken off over the past year, and we were pleased to have the opportunity to ask Jürgen Hartmann which came first in the Mercedes-Benz car factory example he presented? His answer was clear:

“Without RFID, for us there is no Digital Twin.”

Ironically, our April Fool’s post from two days previous was about Digital Conjoined Twins where we joked that the digital twin resides in the optimal location: adjacent to the physical entity that it represents. Perhaps not so silly in the context of industrial applications highly sensitive to latency???

RFID projects championed by the organisation’s finance department?

That is exactly what Joachim Wilkens of C&A argued. The success of their retail RFID deployment was in direct consequence of the C-level being on board, but more importantly by having a business case championed by the finance department:

“This is not an IT project, this is a business project.”

While we’ve observed our fair share of tech-driven deployments over the past few years, we’re increasingly seeing measurable business outcomes. For instance, a recent workplace occupancy deployment delivered, within months, a 15% savings in real-estate. That is a business project—one the finance department would love to repeat!

IoT: the next generation

What will we discuss in our RFID Journal Live 2029 blog post when the IoT celebrates its third decade?   That may well be in the hands of the next generation.   Since we began attending the co-hosted IEEE RFID and RFID Journal Live in 2013, we’ve observed a slow but steady shift in demographics. A younger generation—one which grew up with the Internet—is succeeding the generation instrumental in the development and commercialisation of RFID. On the showroom floor, we’re talking about the Web and APIs. At the IEEE dinner we’re discussing industry-academia collaboration to teach students about applications and ethics. And in the IEEE workshops, ASU Prof. Katina Michael took the initiative to invite one of her undergraduate students to argue the (highly controversial) case for implantables, effectively ceding centre stage to the next generation.

RFID's next generation is coming of age

The final print copy of RFID Journal we received back in 2012 is entitled “RFID’s Coming of Age”. Today I would argue that RFID’s next generation is coming of age. 1999 saw the emergence of the terms IoT and Web 2.0. Might we expect 2019 to mark the emergence of the term RFID 2.0?

5G and the Digital Conjoined Twin

For years we’ve been hearing about the rollout of 5G, with much speculation about how exactly it will transform our daily lives. As with any new technology, the most disruptive use case often emerges completely unexpected. In the case of 5G, even with limited availability, we’re already observing emergence of the digital conjoined twin.

The concept of the digital twin, a digital replica and history of a living or non-living physical entity, percolated up the list of the top buzzwords of 2018. And as vendors now clamber to market digital twin solutions while enterprises scramble to develop digital twin strategies, some individuals are already taking the concept one step further.

Driven by concerns about data privacy in light of the many recent breaches and scandals, a few tech-savvy individuals have elected to reclaim their digital twin, hosting and managing their own digital-self-replica in the cloud themselves. The most intrepid are going so far as to bypass the cloud entirely, instead hosting their digital twins locally—that is to say on their physical person. In the words of one such individual:

“5G eliminates the only remaining reasons for me to choose the cloud: high bandwidth and low latency. So I cut out the middleman.”

By hosting one’s own digital representation, in this case using an open source Node.js server running on a Raspberry Pi with 5G stick, physically attached to oneself at all times, the result is a digital conjoined twin.

The inconvenience of carrying a device that needs to be recharged once or more per day is offset by the fact that the digital twin resides in the optimal location: adjacent to the physical entity that it represents. Updates to the state of the individual are immediately reflected in their digital conjoined twin, accessible on the Internet with sub-millisecond latency thanks to 5G. In the age of instant updates, it simply does not get more real-time than this!

This is distinct from carrying a smartphone, the sidekick device of the past decade. The mobile ecosystem never embraced the digital conjoined twin paradigm as, arguably, this would challenge their established People-as-a-Product business model. It’s easy to see why:

“With this setup I can literally pull the plug on my data at any time. It’s a USB cable connected to a power pack.”

Indeed, 5G introduces the possibility to live “at the edge” in a quite literal sense. And the scenario becomes even more interesting when two pairs of digital conjoined twins meet.

While each human discovers the other visually and subsequently engages in verbal conversation, their digital twins spontaneously discover one another via Bluetooth Low Energy and subsequently engage in IP-over-5G conversation. The digital twins require no intervention from their human counterparts in order to engage one another. This leaves the individuals free to interact with one another, once again without distraction—just as humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years—save of course for the quirky contraptions conjoined with their bodies.

Today, April 1st, 2019, marks the first documented encounter of pairs of digital conjoined twins. It would be foolish not to think of this as the dawn of a new era for humanity.