California tracks pre-schoolers

A California school is using a $50 000 grant given by government towards establishing radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to track its pre-schooler students, reports RFID World.

The Contra Costa County school district has put most of its grant money toward RFID technology such as sensors and RFID readers throughout the school to monitor where each student is daily.

Some parents feel that although it is not encroaching on the children's privacy since they are so young, the money could be better spent to improve the students academically.

A technology partnership aims to use RFID to tackle medicine counterfeiting in Africa, states Securing Pharma.

A collaboration between RFID chip manufacturer Verayo, scanner specialist SkyeTek and medical technology firm GlobalPCCA is ready to start supplying an RFID system in Nigeria and other African countries that would allow verification of pharmaceutical products by the consumer.

The intent is for pharmaceutical manufacturers to affix RFID tags using Verayo's 'un-clonable' chips onto packs of medicine, which can be scanned by battery-powered RFID readers supplied by SkyeTek.

Bangalore University will introduce RFID devices to trap students who steal books from its library, says Daily News and Analysis India.

“Many students who borrow the books for reference or to prepare assignments are not returning them and many others are even keeping back pages from them. According to our observation, many students do this to prevent others from gaining access to the books,” a library staff member says.

The RFID system which becomes operational in January next year, will be able to detect whether a book has been taken out of the library without registration.