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How does one go about taking care of one’s property – one’s worldly possessions? Well, most people keep their money in a bank, store the jewellery in a strongbox and insure the rest. But insurance is not really taking care of your possessions, is it? It is taking care of yourself so that you do not have replace them with your own money.

In the old days, and even now, I presume in some places, you would employ a boy to watch over your sheep or cattle or bring them in at night for fear of big cats, wolves or rustlers. These were an early kind of security guard and indeed rich people had and frequently still do have personal body guards.

What if you had a large office with a hundred laptop computers – laptops because employees had to do field work too? How would you keep track on all those? A car is another good case in point and construction site machinery is being stolen all the time even from under the noses of (or with the help of) private security firms.

So what can you do? Get dogs? That works sometimes, but they can be poisoned. Get video cameras and passive infra-red movement sensors linked to a control centre? That works and many firms and private houses have it, but it is very expensive.

As a cheap alternative, the police were handing out free pens in the UK, which wrote in invisible ink. The idea was to put your postcode and house number. This ink became visible under a certain kind of light. That is all very well if you have a suspect or found property.

Bar codes are not realistic, the pen is better. It all comes back to insurance or surveillance.

However, there is another way that is becoming reasonably priced. The idea has been around for approximately 85 years, but it was too pricey to use on anything smaller than an airplane or a battle tank.

I am talking about radio frequency identification or RFID for short. The idea is the same one that aircraft have been using since during the Second World War – a transponder emits precoded information in response to a demand from an RF reader.

Information concerning ownership and particulars of what the object is can be written to an RFID chip also called a tag and the tag can then be glued inside the item that it is to protect.

There are two varieties of tag: the passive and the active. Passive tags will only respond if information is requested by a reader, whereas an active tag is always broadcasting.

Many business people use RFID tagging to keep track of their assets. In the instance of farm animals, most cattle are tagged these days. Most large offices have their IT goods tagged as well and we all know that fashion stores have been tagging clothes for years, although maybe you did not know what that button was that they were taking off at the till.

People are already tagging their dogs, cats and cars and it will not be long before these asset management techniques will be employed extensively at home as well. Insurance companies may insist on it.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on quite a few topics, but is now concerned with the RFID asset management. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.

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