RFID awareness need to improve

Although vendors and consultants alike have been shouting from the roof tops about RFID, the awareness of RFID need to improve says the Unisys survey reported by silicon.com. In the UK, even pharma seems to be embracing RFID quite slowly.In the US, where drug counterfeiting is more common, the pharmaceutical industry is leading from the front in driving uptake of RFID. The US Food and Drug administration is actively encouraging the use of the track and trace chips to secure the supply chain. It said in a recent report: "Significant feasibility studies and technology improvements are underway to confirm that RFID will provide cost-reducing benefits in areas such as inventory control, while also providing the ability to track and trace the movement of every package of drugs from production to dispensing. Most importantly, reliable RFID technology will make the copying of medications either extremely difficult or unprofitable." One such feasibility study in the US saw several major drug manufacturers, including Abbott Laboratories, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Proctor & Gamble, trialling the technology along with pharmacies on 13,500 packages of drugs over eight weeks. On a related note I found this presentation of RFID to be very informative and a good primer on RFID.