Nokia uses RFID tags to watch its security guards

Nokia has enlisted RFID to watch the watchers. The communications equipment manufacturer is using its RFID-enabled mobile phones to track the company’s security guards as they patrol buildings, parking areas and common grounds. The goal? To make sure each guard checks the facilities thoroughly.

Each carries a mobile phone, which looks just like any other Nokia handset, except it’s outfitted with a 13.56 MHz RFID tag in the handset and an RFID reader in the phone’s outer shell. Waving the phone by an RFID-enabled employee badge logs the guard into his or her shift, and as the officer work the shifts, he opens the handset to read RFID tags installed at various points within the facility. When the handset is closed, the reader captures the phone’s tag. Then, via the Nokia cellular network, it transmits that number, along with any other numbers it recently read, to Web-based software called the Service Manager.

Shift supervisors can query the software to find out what time the guard began and ended the shift and whether he checked the locations he’s required to. “For example, we’ve used it to track where a guard is in the building, such as what time he touched a tag in a particular lab, and we can make sure the guard walks through certain areas within a parking garage,” says Joel Buys, a Nokia director of sales who heads up the company’s RFID activities in the Americas region. In addition, supervisors text-message instructions back to a guard’s phone, asking, for example, to double-check an area that may have been compromised in recent weeks.

The RFID system has been in use for just four months at Nokia’s U.S. facilities in Atlanta, Dallas, New York and Seattle, and so far, it’s collected well over 5,000 reads on the guards’ activities, Buys says.

Nokia is considering expanding the system to other regions, and the system is also serving as a proving ground of sorts for Nokia RFID research and development and for future RFID applications. For example, Nokia is working with JCDecaux Finland, a provider of billboard advertising, information displays and other media, to extend the company’s inventory-tracking system using Nokia RFID-enabled phones. JCDecaux now wants to use the phones to track the installation and removal of billboards, posters and similar displays at movie theaters, bus stops and other places.

Source: RFID Journal

Can someone please let me visit the Nokia building in Dallas. Pretty please, with sugar on top? RFID is taking over everything, which is why I disagree with Tommi and everyone else who thinks 2D bar codes are going to take off.