RFID Helps Pets And People

The microchip industry is growing and advancing to help identify everything from migratory patterns to blood glucose levels. The emerging markets are for various types of engineers who are involved with the different processes of design, installation, and packaging.

By Laura French, Star Tribune Sales and Marketing

Last update: March 24, 2008 - 9:41 AM

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology platform that continues to grow because microchips keep shrinking. RFID uses small chips with firmware and integrated antennas to communicate with specially designed readers a few inches to a few feet away. The best-known example is an injectable microchip, about the size of a grain of rice, used to identify lost pets.

Microchips For Fish

Digital Angel, which has a manufacturing plant in St. Paul, produces the pet ID chips and readers marketed by Home Again. The company also creates RFID systems used to track everything from salmon to dairy cattle and even poultry. The systems are "difficult to design and manufacture," according to Digital Angel CEO Joseph Grillo. They have to be designed for "plug and play" operation in some challenging environments, like feedlots, animal shelters and rivers, and for use by people who are not technology experts.

"We have to design for optimal performance," Grillo says. The salmon operations require sophisticated underwater antennas. Livestock applications need "the right amount of read range, because of the challenges of directing the movement of livestock." The systems have to be robust enough to perform in a world that is increasingly loaded with radio signals. Yet they also have to comply with government standards for the use of operating frequencies.

Emerging Markets

RFID systems consist of a number of components: the microchip, its package and antenna, and a device for injecting it, as well as a reader to capture the information conveyed by the chip. Creating these systems requires teams with different skill-sets, Grillo says. Software engineers develop the embedded firmware. Electronic engineers create the hardware. Mechanical engineers figure out how to package the readers and delivery devices for use by veterinarians, farmers and wildlife biologists. Application engineers get out into the field to define unique installation requirements.

Identification has been the focus of RFID technology in everything from pet chips to library books. RFID is now conveying other kinds of information. Biothermal chips tell whether an animal has a fever. Digital Angel holds a patent on a glucose-sensing RFID microchip, which could eventually replace daily blood tests for diabetics. Even blood pressure and blood oxygen levels could someday be communicated through implanted microchips. "Rapid growth comes from converting people from VID (visual identification) to EID (electronic identification)," Grillo says.

For articles and white papers on RFID, visit www.digitalangel.com.

Laura French is principal of Words Into Action, Inc., and is a freelance writer from Roseville.

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