Monday, March 8, 2010

EASY TARGETS: RFIDs land on Iowa prisoners

c/o RFID Journal

Initially, [Hardin County] jail's officers manually tracked each inmate using paper and pen, and input various details—such as that individual's recreation time, head counts and the specifics of any interactions—into the PC, to be stored in the facility's jail-management system. The problem was that the data was often passed through several officers, a great deal of time could elapse before it was entered, and there was no way to prove any stated interactions actually occurred.

In 2005, [Nick] Whitmore began working with technology startup company Codex Corp., which sells a product known as Guardian RFID. He liked the idea of RFID technology, and agreed to try the new system at his jail. At the doorway of each cell, as well as in other key locations throughout the facility, Codex installed an RFID tag built into a tamper-proof metal plate, and provided the jail with Trimble Nomad handheld computers with Socket Mobile CompactFlash RFID reader cards to scan those tags. Each tag, manufactured by Codex, with an Texas Instruments high-frequency (HF) 13.56 MHz RFID inlay compliant with the ISO 15693 standard, is encoded with a unique ID number associated with a cell number in Hardin County's jail-management system. The system also contains a list of all inmates assigned to each cell, along with details regarding every detainee's health, behavior and medication needs. :::MORE HERE:::

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