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06.07
RFID
Industry Hungry for Engineers
By Chris McManes
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)
is an emerging technology that is providing
excellent career prospects for electrical
engineering students, as well as experienced
engineers looking for new opportunities.
“At this point in time, there is
a severe shortage of experienced or at least
reasonably well-trained RF engineers,” said Dr.
Daniel Engels, director of the
Radio Frequency
Innovation & Technology Center at the University
of Texas at Arlington (UTA). “This is true
whether they’re coming out of college with a
bachelor’s degree, master’s degree or even a
Ph.D., and there are precious few of them
available out in industry.
“Most engineers that are trained
in RFID are already working for an RFID company,
either as an integrator or part of an end-user
as RFID experts. There are very few that are
freely available on the marketplace.”
IEEE RFID 2007
Engels served as program chair
for the first IEEE International Conference on
RFID (IEEE RFID 2007) at Gaylord Texan Resort
and Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas, in
late March. The conference featured technical
papers and panel discussions by leading RFID
academic and industrial researchers from around
the world, and provided a showcase for the
latest RFID advances.
IEEE-USA President John Meredith
and President-Elect Russ Lefevre were among the
121 participants.
Meredith, who spoke at the
event, said RFID’s potential to boost U.S.
competitiveness is good for all nations.
“Competitiveness is good because
when we compete as a nation, we raise the bar
for all other countries,” he said. “By working
in RFID, we develop new technologies and find
new applications that are good for everyone
across the globe.”
IEEE RFID 2007 was sponsored by
IEEE-USA, the IEEE New Technology Directions
Committee — which Lefevre chairs — and IEEE
Region 5. Eight IEEE societies — Circuits and
Systems, Communications, Electron Devices,
Engineering in Medicine and Biology, Microwave
Theory and Techniques, Professional
Communication, Social Implications of Technology
and Vehicular Technology — served as technical
cosponsors, as did UTA.
The conference co-located with
RFID World, which drew about 3,000 participants
from around the world. Conference proceedings
are available on IEEE Xplore [www.ieeexplore.ieee.org]
by searching for “IEEE RFID 2007.”
Non-members can go to
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/guide/g_tools_apo.jsp.
The conference included a
luncheon panel, “RFID Issues in Health Care,”
that featured Dr. Michael Meistrell, president
of Healthcare Informatics & Management
Consultancy; Dr. John Stevens, chairman of
Visible Assets, Inc., and chair of the IEEE
RuBee Standards Working Group; and Peter
Spellman, co-founder and senior vice president
of products and services for SupplyScape Corp.
Emily Sopensky, IEEE RFID 2007
general chair, headed a team of volunteers who
put the conference together. Program highlights
will run on a future IEEE.TV broadcast. Plans
are underway to stage IEEE RFID 2008 in Las
Vegas, Nev., 16-17 April.
“It was a wonderful confluence
of energies and interest in RFID,” said Sopensky,
who also chairs the IEEE-USA Committee on
Communications Policy. “It’s an emerging
technology and an emerging conference, and we’re
pleased with the results.”
What is RFID?
On a basic level, RFID systems
use tags and readers to transmit the identity of
an object or person through radio waves. The
tags store information on a microchip connected
to a radio antenna, while the readers emit radio
waves that exchange signals with the tags. The
information is then digitally transferred to a
computer.
RFID is one of a group of
automatic identification technologies that
includes bar codes, optical character readers,
smart cards like those used in mass
transportation and express toll lanes, and some
biometric technologies, among others. Unlike bar
codes, RFID doesn’t require line-of-sight
reading, and information can be exchanged at
greater distances.
“I’m most excited about the many
applications because it will make life better
for us,” Meredith said. “Things like
supply-chain management will improve
productivity and provide goods and services for
people throughout the world. We also have
medical applications like patient tracking that
will improve health care. The applications are
almost limitless.”
The IEEE-USA president is right.
Many companies, as well as the U.S. Department
of Defense, use RFID to track shipments along a
supply chain. Lost pets are often returned to
their owners through the help of tag implants.
Homeland security can be enhanced by placing
wireless sensors inside cargo containers to
detect unauthorized shipments.
Valuable Healthcare
Applications
RFID applications in health care
can greatly improve patient safety by matching
the right patient with the right procedure and
medicine. For example, by placing an RFID chip
on a patient’s wristband, detailed medical
information can be stored and transmitted to
each healthcare provider. That helps to ensure
that a patient gets the proper drugs and that
the right surgical procedure is performed.
Dr. Meistrell, a former heart
surgeon, believes in the value of RFID in health
care, particularly in the operating room. He
cited an Institute for Healthcare Improvement [www.ihi.org] estimate that 15 million instances
of medical harm, or “adverse events,” occur in
the United States each year, or 40,000 per day.
“I think RFID can help in many
areas of health care and be valuable to patient
care,” Meistrell said. “The identification of
things needs to stop being done manually. If you
can reduce adverse events, you can greatly
reduce U.S. healthcare costs.”
Prior to surgery, RFID-affixed
surgical tools better ensure that every surgical
instrument needed for the operation is at the
surgeon’s disposal. Not having a correct tool
during surgery, when time is of the essence, can
have tragic consequences. Other medical
applications of RFID include storing a
patient’s medical data on an implanted tag so
that, in an emergency situation, healthcare
professionals would have instant access to one’s
medical history.
“RFID will provide systems that
will improve the productivity of industry and
organizations throughout the world,” Meredith
said.
Promising Career Field
Because RFID technologies are
still in their relative infancy, the potential
for job growth is enormous. “There are fewer
than 1,000 qualified IT professionals available
worldwide who understand and know enough to
deploy and service RFID technology,” according
to a March
BusinessWeek.com article.
“RFID is starting to get adopted
on a much broader scale,” Engels said. “Today,
there’s still a very low adoption rate,
relatively speaking. As we see it being adopted
on a much broader scale, the demand is only
going to increase. So I believe that the RFID
engineer’s future looks very, very bright.”
Engels, former director and
founder of the MIT Healthcare Research
Initiative in Cambridge, Mass., came to UTA last
summer. An associate professor in the school’s
Electrical Engineering Department, Engels said
one of his goals was to graduate a pool of
students ready for work in the RFID industry.
“We are well on our way to
training the students, so we’ll be able to
produce a continuing stream of experienced and
ready RFID experts coming out of the university,
ready to be hired by the high, high demand that
exists in industry today,” said Engels, who
added that electrical engineering students
searching for RFID careers should include the
technology in their senior design project.
RFID career opportunities not
only look promising for college students, but
also for engineers who are already in the job
market. A representative from ODIN Technologies,
of Dulles, Va., announced during IEEE RFID 2007
that his company is hiring RFID engineers. Brett
Schwarz, chief financial and operating officer
for Mems-ID, said during the conference that his
Australian company plans to open an office in
Santa Barbara, Calif., and will be hiring
engineers.
Engels said current engineers’
skills are applicable in RFID technologies, but
he advises that the key to switching careers was
realizing that your “assumptions are all wrong.”
“RFID does not play in the
high-power space of cell phones and cell
towers,” he said. “The concepts are similar to
the telecom industry, but the details and
assumptions that the systems are built on are
very different, and subtly so. To get yourself
ready to move into the RFID field, which is
desperately in need of your expertise, you need
to take some training sessions. There are
courses at North Lake College [in Irving,
Texas]; courses at UTA that I teach; and courses
offered by a number of different training
programs. Look to get certified.”
Engels added that
The Computing
Technology Industry Association offers the only RFID+ training certification program.
“Get yourself educated and
trained,” he said, “and I guarantee you if you
understand the technology and know what you’re
doing, you’ll be able to go out and find a job
in this field because we are severely short of
engineers that have good knowledge and good
initiative to come into the RFID field.”
So how long does it take for an
engineer to move into RFID?
“You should be able to get the
training — if you self-study plus one or two
courses — in six months or less because you have
the basic knowledge already,” Engels said. “It’s
just re-training your brain on those basic
assumptions and subtleties that exist for RFID,
as opposed to the telecom industry.”
Technical Program Committee
Engels also headed the IEEE RFID
2007 technical program committee, which received
105 papers by technical experts at major
universities and companies from 27 countries in
Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South
America. Of these, 32 were selected for
presentation at the conference.
Christian Floerkemeier’s
“Bayesian Transmission Strategy for Framed ALOHA
Based RFID Protocols” paper was recognized by
the technical program committee as the best
paper.
Former IEEE WISE (Washington
Internships for Students of Engineering) intern
Matthew Ezovski presented a paper that he wrote
with his WISE Faculty Member in Residence, Dr.
Steve Watkins. Entitled “The Electronic Passport
and the Future of Government-Issued RFID-Based
Identification,” it was an update of the
research Ezovski did during his 2005 summer
internship at IEEE-USA.
IEEE RFID 2007 Volunteers
The IEEE RFID 2007 organizing
committee, which included Engels, Sopensky,
Merrily Hartmann and Paul Hartmann, put the
two-day conference together in nine months, half
the time usually reserved for such events. Luke
Maki and Brenda Huettner assisted with
publications; Robert Shapiro was finance chair;
and Brian Fraser was publicity chair.
“I think this was a phenomenal
success, given the short timeline we had,”
Engels said. “The presentations were all very
good; the sessions were surprisingly
well-attended; our plenary session was
standing-room only; and many of the sessions,
particularly with the more controversial papers,
such as on security, were well-attended and very
close to standing-room only.
“So it was very gratifying to
see the participants engaged.”
Chris McManes is IEEE-USA's
senior public relations coordinator...
Comments may
be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org. Opinions expressed are the
author's.
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