RFID Applications in E-Healthcare - E-Healthcare Systems and Wireless Communications - page 76

Table 2. Decades of RFID

Decade Event
1940 - 1950 Radar refined and used, major World War II development effort, RFID invented in 1948.
1950 - 1960 Early explorations of RFID technology, laboratory experiments.
1960 - 1970 Development of the theory of RFID.
Start of application field trials.
1970 - 1980 Explosion of RFID development. Tests of RFID accelerate. Very early adopter implementations of
RFID.
1980 - 1990 Commercial applications of RFID enter mainstream.
1990 - 2000 Emergence of standards. RFID widely deployed. RFID becomes a part of everyday life.
2000 - present RFID explosion continues.
Landt, J. (2005). The History of RFID. IEEE Potentials, 24(4), 8-11. Retrieved from http://www.scopus.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/record/
display.url?eid=2-s2.0-33847741124&origin=inward&txGid=DUqZ92v5RyWfZjJeOh3fGLb%3a2#

access control and rail applications in Europe.
In the year 1991, the world's first electronic
highway was opened in Oklahoma were vehicles
could pass through the toll collection points at
highways speed unimpeded by the toll booths or
barriers. Thereafter, RFID toll and rail application
appeared in many countries namely Australia,
Argentina, Brazil, China, Canada, Hong Kong,
Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, New Zealand, South
Africa, South Korea, Singapore and Thailand.
Research and development continued throughout
the 1990s with new technological developments
expanding the functionality of RFID including
integrated circuit development and size reduc-
tion until microwave RFID tags were reduced to
a single integrated circuit. The exploration of the
technology continues in the 21 st century to unfold
and utilize its potential judiciously (Landt, 2005).
Although RFID has been around for more than
half a century now, it is just recently that it has
attracted so much attention due to the convergence
of lower cost and increased capabilities of RFID
tags. The importance that RFID is given today, is
due to the impetus provided by mandatory RFID
tagging decrees by Wal-Mart, the US Defense
Department and European companies such as
Metro and Tesco; which has forced other compa-
nies to take a closer look at what RFID can do for
them. Nowadays RFID is used as a direct replace-

ment of the barcode technology since it offers
distinct advantages over the latter - the main be-
ing to eliminate line of sight (LOS) requirements.
The RFID devices are also beginning to take over
the magnetic-stripe security cards usually used
for unlocking doors and granting access to secured
areas (Landt, 2005).
Currently RFID is emerging as an important
technology for revolutionizing a wide range of
application areas including supply chain manage-
ment, asset management and tracking, education
sector, retail sales, anti-counterfeiting and health-
care. RFID also offers a platform for research due
to its relative novelty and proliferation. It has led
to the emergence of a new academic research
area that builds on existing research in a host
of disciplines, such as electronic engineering,
information systems, computer science and busi-
ness strategy, because of which there has been a
significant increase in the number of papers on
RFID in research journals (Ngai, Moon, Riggins
& Yi, 2008, p.511).
Radio Frequency Identification has become
an exciting area of technological development
and is receiving increasing amounts of attention
with more than 3000 RFID case studies in a broad
range of application areas. It is so predicted that
RFID will be worth billions of dollars in new
investments. According to the IDTechEx, a lead-