Medical ID tags, no matter what form they take, are looked for as part of standard practice by emergency responders and medical personnel.  By alerting doctors and first responders to conditions such as allergy sensitivity, blood group and medications being taken, much time can be saved and there is no doubt that lives have been saved because of the information contained on such identification tags.

Medical identification tags are suitable for many more people than those with an allergy or a condition such as diabetes, in fact there are many more instances where medical personnel need to be alerted and can be easily enough.

If a patient has any of the following, a medical identification tag will assist in identifying both the patient and more importantly, the condition which they suffer from:

• Alzheimer’s Disease
• Atrial Fibrillation
• Diabetes (type 1 and 2)
• Angina
• Low Blood Pressure
• Arrhythmias
• Pacemakers
• Surgical issues e.g. heart surgery, cancer treatment
• Transplant
• Epilepsy
• Medicine Use (especially where multiple prescriptions are being taken)
• High Blood Pressure
• Benign Intracranial Hypertension
• Hypertension
• Low Blood Pressure
• Allergy information

Once a medical responder understands you suffer from a set of conditions or are taking a particular type of medication, treatment options can be much more rapidly assessed.  Vitally, avoiding some treatment regimes is essential for certain types of patient – if a patient is recovering or taking medication as a consequence of a heart condition, then certain standard drugs for pain control must be avoided or else there is serious risk to life.

Medical identification tags are also becoming more “intelligent” – the obvious development with tags was to include patient identifiers such as name, address and next of kin, but with advances in technology, a new generation of smart tags are under development.  Using microchips, much more information can be stored and indeed, there is no practical or theoretical limit to the amount of information which can be stored in this way.

Imagine a scenario where an unconscious individual is admitted to an ER facility, and while the patient is as yet unknown, the medical identification tag contains a chip which holds a copy of the patient’s medical records.  By using the appropriate reader, medical responders can access the entire medical history of the individual including such ancillary information as insurance coverage so they know the bill will be settled prior to treatment being provided!  It has not been unknown for essential treatment to be withheld or delivered after considerable delay while such administrative issues have waited to be resolved – cold comfort to you if you are the patient in this instance.

Development of medical identification tags is flowing into other identification and tracking areas.  RFID technology for instance, has been used for some time to track moveable assets, but the application to people has been discouraged in many instances because of the threat to civil liberties. So far, application has been restricted to those prisoners who are sentenced to house arrest but there are obvious medical applications for those who suffer from dementia for instance.

One thing is clear, the days of a simple metal tag with a blood group imprinted upon it have become numbered – the days of the smart medical tag are almost upon us.

A barcode is an optical machine readable representation of information that originally used simple parallel lines with the width of the lines and spacing in between determining the information being carried.  A rapid development was the introduction of other geometric shapes (triangles, squares, rectangles and other polygonals) to represent data and these are also known as barcodes.

A barcode costs a fraction of a cent (approximately $0.005) to produce and implement which competes very well with more recent systems such as RFID tags which are capable of greater functionality (such as real time tracking of inventory) however, they do cost substantially more (around $0.07 to $0.30 per tag).

Today barcodes are used to carry much more detailed information for users and the information is also now capable of being read by the product’s end user as an aid to the selection and usage of the purchase.  Barcode readers are equally simple and cheap to operate and many retail outlets are providing customers with handheld readers for self-scanning of their purchases and also to provide the customer with greater information that is tailored to the marketing aims of the retailers rather than the manufacturer.

The universal applicability and cost effectiveness will ensure that the barcode will remain with us for many years to come and no doubt its life expectancy will continue to be extended as the simplicity lends itself to greater application in the technology led world.

New Year is just around the corner and we are getting ready for welcoming 2009 in and waving goodbye to 2008 as it heads for the history books.

This last year has seen a range of developments in technology which have massively broadened the application of tagging and carrying information – this is after all what the point of a tag is – to carry information.

I expect to see greater application of RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) technology with labeling and not just in security functions to protect goods from shop lifters but also in delivering information to consumers.  Already, there are several test programs for carrying RFID tags on food products so the customer can use a scanner provided by the store not only to automatically add the item to the bill but give the buyer a history of where the food is from, who grew or produced it, when it was made and what went into it and a host of other good stuff.  This is not so far fetched as you may think and they are already introducing this technology in the UK with leading grocery store, Sainsbury’s.

I’m also going to predict a dramatic increase in the application of biometric tagging in both identification and security functions.  Biometrics have still to achieve their full potential and there is the money in the market for it – the government is throwing huge sums not just at biometric development but in furthering the application of reliable technology.  There is just too much money being invested for this to fall flat on its face.

What else takes my fancy?

I think that there will be some of the first integrated scanning technology delivered for use in cell phones – in fact, I’ll confess, I know this is going to happen as a friend of mine writes cell phone reviews and Visa has been teaming up with several handset manufacturers so a cell phone will also be able to scan intelligent tags and act as a money payment device.  Still in its infancy but the Europeans are stepping up the momentum here and I expect we’ll catch up with them on this sooner rather than later.

That’s all from me for 2009, drive safe if you are going out to party and enjoy the holidays and we’ll see you all next year

Take look at some of the law enforcement statistics regarding lost and stolen property:

• a tagged item is 37 times more likely to be returned to the owner than an untagged one;
• 92% of crimes involving stolen property result in a conviction as a direct result of tagged items being found in the possession of the criminal involved;
• a tagged pet is returned to owner 90% of the time while an untagged one less than 10% of the time
• more than 80% of convicted thieves surveyed have responded that they are deterred by tagging of property;
• 100% of convicted thieves surveyed responded they would choose to steal from an untagged property than one where tagging was practised; and
• tagging is estimated to save $17 billion annually in insurance costs due to reduced payouts and premiums for policyholders.

RFID has far more constructive uses than just making sure a crook sticks to a curfew. RFID tags are used to track containers and shipments even down to the individual parcel in certain cases, but the technology has recently been enjoying new application.

Wells Fargo has the job of tracking thousands of laptops from hundreds of locations and knowing when one can leave a location and who ought to have possession of it has been a security nightmare.  Using RFID, each laptop has been implanted with a tag which has upon it the information necessary to automatically detect whether it can in fact leave their offices and in who’s possession it ought to be.  More than this, in the event of a lost or stolen laptop, RFID can be employed to track the location of the device in order to recover it.

Though the concept behind RFID is simple, the technology required is in fact extremely complex.  In this instance, complex technology does mean high cost for individual readers and tags and the price tag for most RFID solutions is beyond the budget of individual customers when insurance and ensuring back-up procedures are so much more cost effective.  An RFID kit from Tiktag will probably cost in the region of $190 yet insuring the laptop against loss of theft will cost a fraction of that amount.

RFID technology is not limited to tracking assets and determining the location of missing items for big companies with car tracking technology having been around for over a decade and the benefit certainly outweighs the cost in such instances.  When it comes to smaller, portable devices such as laptops, smart phones and personal items the cost effective technology for RFID tagging for personal use is still some distance away.

Article provided by MaverickLabel.com, a good source for custom property ID labels & RIFD labels.