How does one go about taking care of one’s property – one’s worldly possessions? Well, most people keep their money in the bank, store the jewellery in a safe and insure the rest. But insurance is not really taking care of your possessions, is it? It is taking care of yourself so that you do not have renew them with your own money.

In the old days, and even now, I suppose in some countries, you would employ a boy to watch over your sheep or cattle or bring them in at night for fear of lions, wolves or thieves. These were an early kind of security guard and indeed wealthy people had and frequently still do have private body guards.

What if you had a large office with a hundred laptop computers – laptops because employees had to do field work too? How would you keep track on all those? A car is another good case in point and construction site machinery is being stolen all the time even from under the noses of (or with the help of) private security firms.

So what can you do? Get dogs? That works sometimes, but they can be poisoned. Get video cameras and passive infra-red movement sensors linked to a control centre? That works and many firms and private houses have it, but it is very expensive.

As a cheap alternative, the police were handing out free pens in the UK, which wrote in invisible ink. The idea was to put your postcode and house number. This ink became visible under a special type of light. That is fine if you have a suspect or found goods.

Bar codes are not practical, the pen is better. It all comes back to insurance or surveillance.

However, there is another way that is becoming reasonably priced. The idea has been around for approximately 85 years, but it was too pricey to use on anything smaller than an airplane or a battle tank.

I am talking about radio frequency identification or RFID for short. The idea is the same one that aircraft have been using since during the Second World War – a transponder emits precoded information in answer to a request from an RF reader.

Details regarding ownership and particulars of what the item is can be written to an RFID chip also known as a tag and the tag can then be glued inside the object that it is to protect.

There are two varieties of tag: the passive and the active. Passive tags will only reply if information is requested by a reader, whereas an active tag is always broadcasting.

Many business people use RFID tagging to keep track of their assets. In the instance of livestock, most cattle are tagged these days. Most big offices have their IT devices tagged as well and we all know that fashion stores have been tagging garments for years, although perhaps you did not know what that button was that they were taking off at the till.

Individuals are already tagging their dogs, cats and cars and it will not be long before these asset management techniques will be used extensively at home as well. Insurance companies may demand on it.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on several topics, but is now concerned with the RFID asset management. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.