RFID technology is growing and moreso now with recent developments that have put RFID technology to use in more unique ways.
RFID has been used to track linens in hotels, livestock on farms and now it has even been tested on employees in the workplace to track their daily, minute-to-minute movement. An experiment was recently done at Queralt Inc., a company that develops cloud-based RFID, GPS, and sensor applications, to track worker movement in a manufacturing plant. The experiment proved successful and it was concluded that passive RFID tags could be used to track workers within a company environment to measure levels of productivity, times in and out, as well as to track how much time is spent on lunch.
For the test, Queralt assigned a unique RFID tag to each of its 250 employees. The employees collected the tags at the start of their eight-hour shift and then handed them back at the end of the day before they left for the day. A passive reader registered employees start time after they walked through a point where the reader was detected. Another reader was set up to register the employees arrival at their. There were additional readers set up throughout the company to measure worker movements during various shifts.
Questions about privacy came up as expected, but CEO, Michael Queralt has assured the usage of such RFID tags and readers would be solely for the purpose of verifying actual time entered by employee and the tags would help to see whether employers are in compliance with federal wage and hour rules.
