Douglas Adams would have said it had he been alive. RFID hype and panic cycles are notorious. Either RFID is end all to this world's problems - when it helps mankind be ever more dare I say be more efficient by keeping track of its myriad consumables, or it is the root of all evil - when it stops pacemakers and defibrillators from working. The recent article that has caused all this brouhaha is an innocuous and well researched and lucidly written paper by 5 dutch researchers, published by the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA for short).

Quite Simply all that is being said by the paper is this - "Strong RF signals cause EMI (Electro Magnetic Interference) in electronic devices thereby disrupting their normal mode of operation". Specifically it says, off-the-shelf RFID readers can cause malfunction of "critical care equipment" in hospitals when used in their proximity.

It doesn't make any assertion about RF signals causing bodily harm at all, just in case you were wondering.

Hmm.. that's fair isn't it? - If I use my cellphone (1-4W) next to a speaker, it causes the speaker to sputter, so it is quite likely that a strong RF emitter like a 3W RFID reader (by comparison a microwave typically radiates 700W) should cause problems when put next to an electronic device. The 2.5G iphones radiate about 1.59W and the article points out that a similar study carried out in 2007 by the same researchers has found that newer cellphones cause similar problems like shown with RFID in the proximity of critical care equipment.

Woah! what is more common - a cellphone or a 3W UHF RFID reader?. Last I heard we had half the population of this world outfitted with a cellphone, but only a few tens of thousands of UHF RfID readers sold. Let's take solace in the fact that although the research is credible and regulation should therefore take some kind of action, we better worry about cell-phones first.

Alright, so I said we have time but does it still mean RFID has no future in Hospitals?. Let me try and be as resounding as I can about this - RFID is a general term encompassing many different frequencies, power-levels and applications. Failing in one very specific and worst case test of RFID, DOES NOT mean the death of RFID across the board.

Infact, the most common frequency in use in hospitals for consumables authentication, patient management and drug tracking is 13.56 MHz (typically at 200mW) which surprisingly finds no mention in the paper. Instead a 868Mhz reader operating at potentially more than the 2W ERP allowed by European regulations, which hardly is popular in hospitals to begin with is a huge cause for concern - why again?!. This is like being afraid of all tomatoes unequivocally because there is one out there that can potentially harbor salmonella - you would have to be a little paranoid to stop eating tomatoes altogether won't you?.

All being said, one must give credit to the effort put by the researchers ( test cases are online at http://www.amc.nl/?pid=5266) and their results but we must take a deep breath, be rational and NOT PANIC.

Not one year goes by when the RFID market is projected to grow at an even more resounding, oh! last year is so out of fashion rate. This year has been little different with the latest report from ABI giving us another giant glimmer at the end of the tunnel, a sort of pat in the back saying carry on because the rewards are stupendous for those who persevere.

ABI in their latest report released last month (week of the 19th May) assert that sales will grow at a lip-smacking 15% annually between 2007 and 2013 reaching an eventual target of 9.7B. This they say could have been much faster had it not been for slower than expected growth in the more high volume segments like access control, toll management etc.

The Skeptic in us will question - do these projections really hold up? Well, discerning members of the cynics club should take a look at what ABI said to all of us back in 2003 , (http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/view/506/1/1) when they made the assertion that the RFID market will be worth a healthy 3.1B. The good news is that well, mostly the analysts agree that in 2007 the world did a little better than expected by grossing in 4.9 B in RFID sales. The sour news is that the analysts back in 2003 were nowhere close in their assertion that most of this value will be garnered in the operations/supply chain sector. By even the most optimistic estimates the combined market share of the asset management and supply chain sector is at 13%, (http://www.idtechex.com/products/en/articles/00000813.asp) and has decreased from the then 20% instead of growing to 42% as predicted.

Ah! great, the market is much bigger than ABI could have imagine in 2003 you say, well, it is nice if you are the one looking outside in, but for those who are trapped in this RFID bubble it means one thing and only one thing - the market is larger sure, but way more fragmented then we could have imagined in 2003. Not only do we have a plethora of frequencies, a plethora of regulatory environments and standards, a plethora of vendors and SI's but now we have an ever increasing plethora of applications. Say hello to a market with a Pareto distribution. Can't say if the Industry has grown up but it sure has grown fatter.

How fat can fat be? To illustrate this I can't help but make the hackneyed comparison of one wireless technology to another, in this case RFID with the cellphone industry. Recently I heard that ITU is announcing that by the end of the year half the world's population will have been handed a cellphone over which they will merrily be making small talk with their next door neighbour. 3.3 B in the last 20 years is an impressive feat no doubt but when you realize that RFID companies are trying to similarly slap a tag to everyday objects from pill bottles to freight cars, the mind boggles knowing that an average new yorker alone has access to 10B different product choices. So, either the analysts at ABI are right and the growth rate is 15% for the next 30-50 years till we tag everything around us or in reality the growth rate is going to be much larger, say, maybe twice as much... From my own experience working on embedded projects I can tell you one sure thing, that the wackiest RFID application you can dream of is already in production