A Guide to RFID Technology & How It Is Used

While being beneficial, building an app that supports such technology requires quite a lot of expertise and knowledge. So, to help you better understand the basics of RFID and how it generally works, we’ve decided to create an extensive guide.

Apart from the basics, we’ll additionally review some interesting cases of how RFID can be used, and talk about different types of it. To prevent confusion, we’ll take a look at another 2 most popular wireless communication systems that are often viewed as an alternative but are in fact highly different in use.

To sum it all up, we’ll talk about how to integrate RFID Tech into your application and what third-party RFID providers there are on the market. Welcome! 🚀

📚 Radio Frequency Identification Basics & Use Cases

To begin with, let’s take a closer look at what RFID actually is. It’s a wireless network that relates to technologies of the AIDC or Auto ID (Automatic Identification and Data Capture) family. As the name says, the technologies of this group identify, communicate, store, and record information with little to zero human intervention.

In general, this is exactly what RFID does — a network of 3 hardware devices (an RFID reader, an RFID tag/smart label, and an antenna) allows scanning and identifying objects by utilizing electromagnetic fields.

Also, understanding RFID technology is essential for anyone involved in prototyping model in IoT, as it offers insights into how wireless communication systems can be integrated into IoT solutions.

The real question is how you can use it within your mobile application. And the answer will vary depending on the industry you’re operating in. To give you some inspiration on how you can apply RFID technology, we’ll review some fascinating use cases of it. So, even if you already have a clear understanding of your preferences, you might find ways to enhance them.

Another attention-grabbing use case of RFID tags is uniform and linen tracking. Generally speaking, companies and organizations with a lot of uniform or linen units (hotels, restaurants, cruise businesses, etc.) use RFIDs to track the duration of use, the number of washing times, prevent thefts, etc.

For example, Mr. C Hotel Beverly Hills uses RFID tags from Linen Tracker to keep track of their luxury linens when sending them out for laundry (and receiving them back) since the hotel uses external services for this matter.

The tags are sewn into each piece of linen sheets, pillowcases, towels, or tablecloths. Linen Tracker doesn’t provide tracking tools for digital monitoring so the hotel additionally uses TrackX (previously — Fluensee) software to perform the management. This way, the hotel was able to reduce the number of missing items from an average of 20-30% to as little as 3%.

⚙️ Types of RFID Tags: Passive, Active & Co

There are 2 main ways of categorizing or differentiating RFID technology and smart labels — operating frequency band and system types. In this section, we’ll review both categorization techniques and talk about use cases for each type.

📶 RFID vs NFC vs BLE

NFC and BLE are often the networks that get compared with RFID so we thought it might be useful to discuss how they correlate and their differences to prevent possible confusion.

NFC

Let’s start with NFC (Near-Field Communication). Firstly, it’s essential to mention that NFC isn’t something separated from RFID — it’s in fact, a subcategory of High-Frequency RFID systems.

Even though it’s related to RFID, NFC is often considered a whole unique technology since it uses a highly specific frequency for communication (13,56 MHz, which isn’t really important but good to know). Additionally, NFC has a much shorter read range, requiring the tag and the reader be no more than a couple of cm away from each other.

Another special feature of NFC is that the technology doesn’t allow reading multiple tags at once and can handle only 1 at a time. Its key advantage, however, is significantly bigger storage capabilities, that allow communicating and storing large amounts of data.

As for the use cases, one of the most widespread ones is contactless payments. NFC can also be used for marketing promotional campaigns. For example, companies can attach NFC tags to product labels so customers can scan them with their phones and get detailed product-specific information.

📲 RFID Integration into your App

And here comes the question of how you can implement the RFID technology into your app software. To begin with, you luckily don’t have to build your own RFID hardware. You can easily find third-party providers who offer hardware as well as APIs/SDKs for the software.

🔎 Zebra & Tertium: Case Studies

Last but not least, let’s take a look at 2 RFID hardware and SDK providers (with completely different Value Propositions) and review their services. You might find some inspiration for your own business ideas or think about what you would avoid when working with your own clients.

Let’s start with Zebra. It’s one of the most widespread RFID technology providers. Generally, they sell both hardware and software solutions, and their offer is extremely broad. Numerous smart tag options, mobile computers and tablets, printing devices, various scanning technologies, mobile robots, and many others.

As for RFID technology, Zebra offers multiple products — handheld and fixed readers, antennas, printers, tags, and portals for automatic tag registering. As for the software part, you can take a look at all the available SDKs and tools on this page.

What allows Zebra to stand out is its diversity of services and full-service packages. Whatever their customers might need — RFID hardware, software, their maintenance — Zebra can provide it.

Our second candidate Tertium has a rather limited number of products to offer to its customers. These are High-Frequency and Ultra-High-Frequency mobile RFID readers as well as desktop industrial RFID tech fully prepared for use. Their readers are additionally equipped with the BLE communication standards.

As for the software part, Tertium doesn’t offer any dedicated software. Alternatively, they provide an SDK for their products that their clients can get and build into their applications. So, as you can see, there’s not that much to review here because the company has quite a limited sector they’re operating in.

And it’s not bad at all. Their main advantage is clear specialization and an intuitive website that explicitly tells visitors what Tertium’s services are and what value they offer their customers.

💡 Takeaways

RFID applications market is very broad and can be used for multiple use cases. Plus, it’s still dynamically developing — one of the main trends as of now is its closer integration with cloud services.

Apart from the RFID technologies diversity, there are also quite a lot of alternative wireless networks. Thus, it’s highly important to understand your own business needs so as to find the best fitting solution for your use case.