We wrote a couple of weeks ago about the coming age of micro tracking devices, the size of a grain of rice, small enough to.... well, small enough to swallow without knowing. <a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0130824/2004/02/06.html#a45" RFID's: Get Ready for Your Own Personal Jammer</a> . But no, not even in our own radical proposal for the need for your own personal jamming system did we predict that someone would seriously propose embedding a micro radio transmitter on a chip into every pharmaceutical product.
That was until yesterday, when, over a leisurely cup of breakfast coffee, there was the Washington Post quoting Federal Drug Administration Commissioner Mark McClennan:
"The makers of tracking devices have been experimenting with radio frequency computer chips, smaller than a grain of rice, that would be attached to drug labels or drug boxes, or even embedded in the medication itself. McClellan said tests are underway to determine the effect of the chips on the drugs' effectiveness and quality." <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52784-2004Feb18.html">FDA Looks to Chips to Thwart Drug Counterfeiters (washingtonpost.com)</a>
And so even before the first supply chain instantiation using RFIDs gets onto a pallet rolling into a Wal-Mart near you, the government has already moved this to a whole new application area. RFID's will be used, according to the FDA proposal to protect against pharmaceutical piracy. The Washington Post quote came as the result of a press conference where the FDA released an important report entitled "Combating Counterfeit Drugs" http://www.fda.gov/oc/initiatives/counterfeit/report02_04.pdf.
People who have been wrestling over the implications of digital rights management (DRM) and piracy in the music and movie industry will chuckle as they read the report. The FDA is now grapling with the intricacies of the spy vs. spy syndrome; i.e.. will potential counterfeiters smart enough to make copies of $6 pills not be smart enough to get their hands on the very RFID technology that the industry will use? And so the FDA proposal starts to move even further down the slope of steganography and encoded messages whose very transmission must be kept hidden in order to be effective. Imagine the implications!
In the meantime, as we predicted there is a bright future for the RFID industry. By 2007 the database and tracking applications will be in place and we can expect integration with existing supply chain applications. This should promise to become a multibillion industry for system integrators like Accenture (the FDA partner in this study) and IBM with a tsunami of database application upgrades worldwide. In this light, it is easy to see Oracle's Larry Ellison's interest in buying Peoplesoft.
RFID's have hardly caught the public's attention but as we said in our previous article, the tiny chips with antennas are destined to get ever closer to getting under our own skins. But if the industry has anything to learn, it should be the lessons of the same FDA and genetic food labeling. Imagine, when someone with a slightly bigger megaphone than ours, gets wind of this latest proposal. Either it's a wonder how these guys even manage to find their way to work or it's a greater wonder how tone-deaf the standard media is to the intricacies of introducing radical new technologies into the mainstream (no pun intended).
rmb
Copyright 2004 Richard Mendel-Black All Rights Reserved
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