Global Trend

The Massively-Connected World

One of the world’s most powerful technologies is as tiny as a grain of rice. An RFID tag that can be implanted under the skin was approved in November, 2004. Just over a year later, more than 1,000 people have had them implanted in the procedure that takes just five minutes.

One of the first to have it done was Dr. John Halamka of Harvard Medical School, according to his first-person report in the New England Journal of Medicine. Now, anyone with the correct scanner can read Halamka’s medical identification number through his skin to learn who he is, who his doctor is, and any pertinent medical information needed to treat him.

In Mexico, the same sort of radio frequency identification chip is being used to keep track of who has security clearance. Millions of animals already have the chips for identification on farms or for keeping track of pets.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the massively-wired world we’re facing in the very near future, according to an on-line report from the Gartner consulting firm. Soon, everything will be tagged with some sort of microprocessor that will include sensors and a capability for transmitting information wirelessly. This trend is already well under way and will accelerate at a stunning pace in the next few years.

For example, RFID tags are spreading rapidly in the auto industry. There will be an estimated 1 billion cars in the world by 2010. By 2015, half those cars could contain more than 100 sensors each. If each one sends a 16-byte message every second, they’d spew out 6.4 terabytes of information every second.

Cars will represent only a tiny fraction of the RFID tags and other types of wireless devices that will be out there, generating information. Each one of the new Airbus A380 aircraft, for example, will contain more than 10,000 tags. Television sets, household appliances, power tools, surgical devices, and even clothes will come with sensors in the near future. Retailers of all sorts will replace the ubiquitous bar code with RFID tags to track any item sold ? from the factory to the place of purchase ? and perhaps beyond.

These new sensors will be able to measure speed, acceleration, temperature, pressure, force, stress, acidity, and a wide variety of chemical factors. They’ll incorporate microelectromechanical systems (or MEMS) that are already available and in use. As nanotechnology matures, MEMS, RFID chips, and related devices will become smaller, cheaper, and faster ? and therefore more plentiful. We will live in a world where every object will have a unique global reference identification that will broadcast pertinent information to a network 24 hours a day.

New networks will need to be developed to handle this torrent of information and make sense of it. These will be so-called “mesh networks,” which are self-organizing and require low power to run. Motorola, a leader in this field, is already using mesh networks in military and law enforcement applications.

These developments will effectively create a new kind of Internet that is being called “The Real-World Web.” This Web will contain everything from your tire pressure to your blood pressure. In industry, it will allow companies to extend quality control out from the factory into the place where the product is used by monitoring its performance remotely. And the companies that are able to produce the new application software and computer architecture to manage and extract value from the Real-World Web are going to win big.

This will require an entirely new computing environment made up of an enormous number of processing modules that behave like servers. They will be fast, inexpensive, and disposable, and they will automatically retire themselves when they fail. Much of the processing power of this new network will be virtual and handled by new types of software arranged in state-of-the-art architectures.

With data needs now pushing into petabyte territory ? that is, thousands of terabytes ? one of the biggest challenges will be to create new ways to graphically visualize what the system is telling us. Another leap will have to be made that is equivalent to the one made by the graphical user interface popularized by Apple ? the mouse-and-icon model. Even the best displays we have today don’t take advantage of our powerful innate human ability to process images and information. The new types of displays will have to do that for the Real-World Web to work.

This new web of information will be a truly disruptive paradigm shift, with abundant opportunities and hazards for all players. This development, already underway, is happening very fast. The Department of Defense adopted RFID technology this past summer in a move that caused the numerous companies under its contracts to switch everything in the military over to the new technology and create wireless computer networks to handle all the data.

Among the companies are ODIN Technologies and Unisys, who are key players in the RFID game. This important development means that if you do business with the government, supplying anything from tanks to pencils, you have to adopt RFID technology.

Wal-Mart now requires its suppliers to use RFID systems, which is having a domino effect on the spread of this technology and the expansion of networks to handle it. Target, Best Buy, and numerous individual manufacturing companies are also rapidly adopting the system.

For example, John Deere recently contracted with ODIN’s RFID physics experts to create a network to track its engine parts with a requirement to have the system up and running in just four weeks. The Thomasville furniture company installed a similar system, maintained by Unisys, to manage its supply chain and track customer orders all the way to the customer’s door.

Microsoft has teamed up with Texas Instruments to create a postal system using RFID technology, so that packages will communicate with sorting equipment and then report their whereabouts throughout their entire journey, including e-mailing the sender and the recipient about delivery times and confirmations. According to an article in Computerworld, Microsoft is attempting to introduce the system first in India and Taiwan.

If these networked sensors haven’t entered your business and home already, it’s only a matter of time before they do.

In light of this trend, we offer the six following forecasts for your consideration:

First, by 2010, internal RFID networks will have spread to nearly every business that has to keep track of products or components, and throughout virtually every supply chain of any significance. Anatole Gershman, the global director of research at Accenture Technology Laboratories, recently identified the rise of intelligent sensor networks as the number one trend driving business applications over the next three to five years.

Second, as this technology spreads, those who can think up the most imaginative uses first will position themselves to win big. For example, Kraft Foods is already using RFID tags to track the location and freshness of the ingredients it uses. Construction companies are starting to tag relatively expensive tools that are frequently stolen at building sites. And casino suppliers in Las Vegas have already sold 3 million gaming chips with RFIDs inside to prevent counterfeiting.

Third, everywhere you see a bar code today, you’ll see an RFID tag by 2015 ? if not sooner. On the 10-year timeline, mass deployment of intelligent sensors will reach critical mass throughout all business markets and make their way into society in general. This will represent bottom-line improvements for businesses as well as convenience for customers. For example, the intelligent shopping cart will keep track of what every consumer buys in a grocery store and create a shopping profile of each individual. Today, shoppers typically forget to buy 10 to 12 percent of what they need on every trip to the store. In the future, the smart cart will remind them of what they usually buy, at the time when they usually need it.

Fourth, privacy issues will continue to arise around the collection of information. But we expect the solutions to these issues to be fairly simple. For example, clothing will come with RFID tags intended to let you keep track of your wardrobe and update it by having your closet read the tags and send information to stores where you shop. But if you don’t want that service enabled, equipment installed at the point of purchase will be able to zap the RFID tag so that it no longer works, eliminating any privacy concerns. An entire industry will spring up to do nothing but deactivate intelligent sensors for those who don’t want them around.

Fifth, by 2015, any physical object worth more than $10 will be capable of being cost-effectively tagged and monitored through a wireless network. This network will be able to report the identity and location of each object and any recent activity from any location in the world that is within a mile and a half of a network node. Items worth more than $100 will be able to report much more information, such as chemical and physical parameters. Infrastructure and software at each node will be able to juggle 100 million independent objects and handle messages from each object at a rate of one message every second.

Sixth, by 2025, we will live in a world that is completely networked, making virtually all information available to any authorized person, everywhere, all the time. This will mean being able to have the same influence and interactions nearly anywhere in the world on-line as you would have if you were actually present in person ? but with even better capabilities added by the networked systems. In this scenario, virtual reality will become an important form of reality: It will be your physical connection to the virtual world. New technologies will enable you to use all of your senses through intelligent sensor networks. At the same time, so-called “scalable intelligence” will enable you to think and analyze at much greater speed and depth. The decision-making capabilities of these systems will enable you to act more effectively and efficiently than ever before.

References List :
1. The New England Journal of Medicine, July 28, 2005, Vol. 353, No. 4, “Straight from the Shoulder,” by John Halamka. ⓒ Copyright 2005 by the Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. 2. To access Gartners report on a massively connected world, visit their website at:www.gartner.com/Display/Document?doc_cd=125949