Photos: Tracking people with VoIP and RFID
Summary: IBM has opened an RFID facility in Dublin specialising in asset management. Some of the applications on show include a VoIP-enabled RFID device that could supersede the pager, so we went to take a look
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Together with Magicomm and Nokia, IBM has created a digital pen and
paper system to allow users to transmit written documents via a mobile
phone or upload the information into a laptop. The pen has a unique ID
in a similar fashion to an RFID tag. Data is time-stamped so updates of
forms can be detected.
The digital pen has a built-in digital camera, an image-processing unit and a Bluetooth radio receiver. By writing over the special patterned paper, which consists of millions of tiny dots, it is possible to identify the exact location of the pen and deduce the words being written. The image processor then uploads all the resulting information into the pen's memory which can store several fully written pages.
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