Haiti, RFID, Drinking Water
For a number of reasons, I have grown particularly interested in disaster management and humanitarian relief. The events in India, Haiti and now Japan highlight the great need to provide aid faster and more broadly, ensuring the most number of people are helped with available resources. Like any good student of myriad interests, it makes my day when one or more of my personal research interests converge in some type of meaningful way.
Deep Springs International (DSI) provides tools and methods to obtain or create clean drinking water. After the earthquake in 2010, DSI deployed their people and resources throughout Haiti. Early in March, RFID Journal reported that DSI is now using RFID NFC technology to help out.
As part of that program, DSI sends water technicians to the homes of those who use its kits, to check whether those households are utilizing them properly, and to provide additional chlorine solution, if necessary. To help it better manage its technicians and the data they generate, the organization has begun employing RFID technology—namely, Near Field Communication (NFC) passive 13.56 MHz RFID passive tags attached to buckets, as well as NFC-enabled phones to collect data and forward it to a back-end system.
