**1. Introduction**

In the coming decades, an increasingly larger number of baby boomers will grow into old age. This trend has led to an increasing demand for devices and services (e.g., [1-8]) that can help elderly individuals to live well and independently. *Object locator* is such a device. The device can assist its users in finding misplaced household and personal objects in a home or office. Figure 1 shows several object locators offered today by specialty stores and websites. Each of these locators contains an interrogator with a few buttons and an equal number of tags: Even the largest one, the leftmost one in the figure, offers only 8 buttons. The buttons are of different colors, and there is a tag of the color matching the color of each button. By attaching a tag to an object to be tracked, the user can look for the object by pressing the button of matching color on the interrogator. The tag attached to the object beeps and flash‐ es in response and thus enables the user to find the object. Other locators work similarly.

**Figure 1.** Existing object locators

© 2013 Chou and Liu; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2013 Chou and Liu; licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Existing object locators are not ideal in many aspects: The number of buttons on the inter‐ rogator and tags is fixed, and the number is small. Extending the locator to track more ob‐ jects is impossible. – If the user were to use more than one tag of the same color, the tags would all respond to the search signal for tag(s) of the color from the interrogator. This sit‐ uation is clearly not desirable. – When a tag breaks, the user must purchase a replacement tag of the same color as the broken one. Tags are battery-powered. A tag might become a lost object itself after it runs out of battery. More seriously, the interrogator itself can be mis‐ placed. Obviously, these are serious shortcomings.

scribes the reader collision problem [10] encountered in the prototype and the solution we use to deal with the problem. Section 6 describes a numeric model for computing energy consumption and search time and compares the merits of the designs. Section 7 concludes

Design and Implementation of RFID-Based Object Locators

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/53576

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This section first presents a brief overview of RFID technology as a way to state the assump‐ tions made in subsequent chapters on state-of-the-art readers and tags. Our object locator re‐ sembles location detection systems in its goal: assisting users to locate objects. The section describes existing location systems and compare and contrast them with our object locators.

RFID technology is now applied to a wide spectrum of applications. As an example, person‐ al identification application is used to provide authentication and authorization to individu‐ als carrying their RFID tags so that they can be automatically identified by a central computer. Card-like RFID tags used as smart cards in public transports is another example: Information on money stored in a tag is automatically deducted when the card holder presents the card in front of a reader while getting on or off a transporter. Other applications include using RFID tags as markings of books for more efficient library management, ship‐

Figure 2 shows a typical system that uses RFID technology. The host machine uses one or more RFID readers to retrieve digital information stored in RFID tags and processes the information according to the needs of one or more applications. In general, a RFID tag contains a globally unique identification (UID) as well as data fields organized in a standard way [11]. A RFID-

based object locator only needs the UID information; other data fields are not used.

ping containers for tracking them by retail industry, and so on.

the chapter and discusses future works.

**2. Background and related work**

**2.1. RFID technology**

**Figure 2.** A configuration of RFID system

This chapter describes three designs and a proof-of-concept prototype of object locators based on the *RFID (Radio Frequency Identification)* technology. RFID-based object locators do not have the drawbacks of existing object locators. In particular, RFID-based object lo‐ cators are extensible, reusable, and low maintenance. They are extensible in the sense that the maximum number of tracked objects is practically unlimited and that a RFID-based object locator can support multiple interrogators. The interrogator software can run on a variety of platforms (e.g. desktop PC, PDA, smart phone and so on). A mobile interroga‐ tor can be tagged and thus, can be searched via other interrogators when it is misplaced. Reusability results from the fact that all RFID tags used for object locators can have glob‐ ally unique ids. Hence, tags never conflict, and a tag can be used in more than one object locators. Low maintenance is one of the advantages of RFID technology. One of the de‐ signs uses only RFID tags without batteries; the user is never burdened by the concern that a tag may be out of battery.

This chapter makes two contributions: The first is the object locator designs presented here. The designs use different hardware components and have different hardware-dependent software requirements. The information provided by the chapter on these aspects should en‐ able a developer to build a suitable object locator platform, or an extension to one of the commonly used computer and smart mobile device platforms. The functionality of hard‐ ware-independent object locator software is well defined, and a C-like pseudo code descrip‐ tion can be found in [9].

The hardware capabilities and object search schemes used by the designs lead to differences in search time and energy consumption. We provide here a numeric model that can be used to determine the tradeoffs between these figures of merit. Developers of RFID-based object locators can use the results of the analysis as design guides. Today, object locators based on all designs are too costly: Typical RFID readers have capabilities not needed by our applica‐ tion and cost far more than what is suitable for the application. Through this analysis, we identify the design that is the most practical for the current state of RFID technology and project the advances in the technology required to make RFID-based object locators afforda‐ ble (i.e., with prices comparable with some of the locators one can now find in stores.) This is the second contribution of the chapter.

The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 describes closely related works. Section 3 describes use scenarios that illustrate how a RFID-based object locator may be used. Section 4 presents three designs of RFID-based object locators. Section 5 describes the implementation of a proof-of-concept prototype based on one of the designs. It also de‐ scribes the reader collision problem [10] encountered in the prototype and the solution we use to deal with the problem. Section 6 describes a numeric model for computing energy consumption and search time and compares the merits of the designs. Section 7 concludes the chapter and discusses future works.
