And the Award Goes To...

Excellence in RFID Implementation

The winner of this year's award for Excellence in RFID Implementation goes to the team of Mercy Medical Center, Edwards Lifesciences, and Wavemark, Inc. This application involved the use of WaveMark's 13.56 MHz RFID solution to track costly consumables, like stents, within Mercy's Catheterization Lab. The application was impressive for the degree of information shared between Mercy and Edwards and for the promising results – such as a projected 30% reduction in high-cost inventory, annual labor savings of approximately 400 hours, and reduced waste of perishable product.  

Excellence in RFID Technology

The winner for this year's Excellence in RFID Technology Award is ADASA Inc. ADASA's PAD3500 is a low-cost, wearable, mobile encoder that supports the encoding of tags anywhere, anytime. This ingenious device works in conjunction with ADASA's SmartCartridge, which enables the hands-free loading and encoding of RF tags. The solution has already demonstrated business value in a pilot with Freedom Shopping, which recognized a labor reduction of up to 50%. The ADASA approach makes RFID a practical, cost-effective option for businesses which still rely on manual and hand-picking processes and should help to more broadly expand the adoption of RFID.

Excellence in RFID Pilot

The winner of the Excellence in RFID Pilot award is the team of Information Mediary Corporation and Evidencia LLP for their work with RIO Blanco farms in Chile. The Evidencia pilot involved tracking the location and temperature of avocados during production and transit from Rio Blanco farms in Chile to the United States, using IMC's Log-ic TermAssureRF semi-passive 13.56 MHz RFID Temperature logger.

This pilot demonstrated the reliability of Evidencia's solution to provide total traceability of the fruit from the fields to the end customer Green Giant fruit subsidiary, Echo Farms. This project produced 100% read rates throughout the four-week process and 6,000 mile journey, in spite of challenging temperature and humidity conditions. The pilot clearly demonstrated the value of RFID technology in the cold chain for perishable goods.

RFID Visionary of the Year

The winner of the RFID Visionary of the Year award is Dr. Chris Diorio, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Impinj. There were several reasons for selecting Dr. Diorio and Impinj for RFID Visionary of the year. First, Dr. Diorio was a key contributor in developing practical standards for the RFID industry through his leadership as Chair of the EPCglobal Hardware Action Group (HAG). Second, Dr. Diorio's company, Impinj, has been the world leader in producing useable Gen2silicon. Dr. Diorio brought new ideas in the area of near field UHF communications. His leadership has helped overcome some of the environmental challenges to RFID, such as metal or water, to produce working solutions, facilitating the migration of supply-chain solutions beyond the pallet and down to item-level tracking.

Most Innovative RFID Application

The winner of the Most Innovative RFID Application goes to Texas Instruments (TI) for its use of RFID in animal tracking for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The project involved tracking white-lipped peccaries, a type of wild pig in the Amazon for the WWF, using a passive, low-frequency RFID ear tag. This RFID solution was less invasive and 100 times less expensive than GPS options. The WWF is using the information to better understand animal behavior to conserve the species and its habitat. This application stood out based on TI's ability to cost effectively address the very distinct challenges posed in tracking a wild animal in a harsh, non-controlled environment. While this project was unique in a number of ways, it also demonstrated the potential of RFID to operate reliably in challenging application environments.