Regular readers of this column (and of the RFID industry press in general) understand that retail RFID compliance programs are rarely a revenue-positive proposition for anyone but the RFID vendors and mandate-imposers. Retail giants such as Wal-Mart have published their cost savings due to the use of RFID technology, but most of their suppliers have noted that compliance is an additional net cost for them.
But the situation is different for the pharmaceutical industry. Major pharmaceutical manufacturers have announced large-scale pilot programs for item-level product tagging. They see clear advantages in thwarting counterfeiting and therefore boosting revenue by moving to item-level tagging. The pharmaceutical industry is taking a different approach to RFID technology than the retail industry, but interesting developments in the marketplace may lead to a convergence in standards sooner than previously thought.
Recent Developments And Technical Challenges
I've written previously about Pfizer's RFID pilot for Viagra. The past month saw yet another major announcement of RFID use by a drug manufacturer. GlaxoSmithKline will be putting RFID tags on bottles of Trizivir, a medicine used to treat HIV. Trizivir is on the FDA's list of most-commonly counterfeited drugs. These and similar RFID programs represent manufacturers' attempts to stay ahead of pending U.S. legislation to mandate item-level tagging in the pharmaceutical industry.
Item-level tagging of pharmaceuticals involves some interesting technical problems for RFID technology. Many drugs are packaged in foil blister packs that both block and reflect radio frequency energy. Other drugs are packaged in liquid forms which absorb RF energy. Case-packs of all pharmaceuticals contain a high density of individually-labeled doses, thus requiring a high degree of accuracy in scanning tags within a case. Unfortunately, the high density of tags increases the opportunity for the tags to interfere with each other.
Tag and reader manufacturers are taking a variety of approaches to address these concerns. The most common approach is to use high-frequency tags (HF) rather than the ultra-high-frequency (UHF) tags employed in the EPC Gen 2 standard for retail RFID. The early industry experience with HF showed it to be more useful around metal and liquids. Another approach is to use a variety of frequency-hopping schemes to reduce tag interference and increase reader accuracy. The pharmaceutical pilot programs represent a real-world experiment in finding the best path forward among competing technologies.
EPC Global is also involved in the search for a common standard. They have created the EPC Global Item Level Tagging Joint Requirements Group to work towards a common standard for tagging all kinds of problematic items, including DVDs (which contain metal, as shown by their silver color) and pharmaceuticals. EPC Global is currently inviting hardware vendors to demonstrate their use of low-frequency, high-frequency and ultra-high-frequency solutions for item-level tagging.
Towards A Common Technology
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