David Savastano, Editor06.27.23
Data logging is one of the most promising and important areas for RFID. Food and medicine security and wastage is a major concern, whether it is spoilage during transport, passing expiration dates or, in the case of higher-priced goods and medicines, counterfeits.
Developing solutions that help battle these problems is a specialty of SpotSee, whose RFID and color-changing technologies from its subsidiary Hallcrest Technologies help retailers tell what has happened to the item. Mason McWilliams, product manager for SpotSee, said that SpotSee has a long history of providing simple indicators to indicate whether mishandling has occurred in the supply chain.
“The industry has had a goal to ‘digitize’ the information in the supply chain,” said McWilliams. “In some cases, the information is provided as a complete record of conditions provided by a data logger, but it doesn’t make sense to have a data logger on every single box in every single shipment.
“On the other hand, RFID is a fantastic way to transform information from simple indicators into a digital record of condition. SpotSee has taken mechanical and chemical indicators, integrated them with RFID technology and delivered indicators that provide supply chain data points.”
SpotSee participates in the logistics aspects of several industries; SpotSee RFID indicators have been adopted by automotive, data center, aerospace customers to name a few. Soon, SpotSee will have a solution that is focused on the life science cold chain industry, as in May 2023, the company acquired Marathon Products, which specializes in temperature data loggers and monitors for ultra-low and high temperature applications, primarily for the life sciences market.
“Our mission is to connect our life science customers to the condition of their pharmaceuticals and diagnostics as they travel from manufacturer to patient,” said SpotSee CEO Tony Fonk about the acquisition of Marathon. “The Marathon acquisition gives SpotSee over 50 additional cost-effective solutions for monitoring temperature and humidity, including the best -80⁰C dry ice data logger on the market, which is ideal for ultra-cold chains.”
McWilliams noted that SpotSee integrates condition into passive RFID indicators.
“While some sensors have condition, they are either battery powered (therefore have a shorter shelf life, require a memory chip, and are more expensive) or they are passive (can only tell you the condition at the point in time they are scanned),” said McWilliams.
“For example, there are RFID enabled temperature tags but you either know the temperature at a moment in time not whether something happened over the course of the journey (passive RFID) or the tag has a battery to power the temperature sensor, memory to store the sensor information (active RFID) and is more costly. SpotSee solutions use mechanical/chemical memory to allow users to know what happened over the course of a supply chain.”
With that in mind, SpotSee is working on new product innovations.
“SpotSee has under development a passive RFID temperature indicator that delivers time over temperature information to supply chain participants… using chemistry,” said McWilliams. “This irreversible evidence of temperature excursion is delivered via near field communication (NFC), as well as visually, alerting supply chain participants that the monitored shipment has seen unacceptable temperature and creating an electronic data point at the moment of discovery when reading with a smart device.”
Developing solutions that help battle these problems is a specialty of SpotSee, whose RFID and color-changing technologies from its subsidiary Hallcrest Technologies help retailers tell what has happened to the item. Mason McWilliams, product manager for SpotSee, said that SpotSee has a long history of providing simple indicators to indicate whether mishandling has occurred in the supply chain.
“The industry has had a goal to ‘digitize’ the information in the supply chain,” said McWilliams. “In some cases, the information is provided as a complete record of conditions provided by a data logger, but it doesn’t make sense to have a data logger on every single box in every single shipment.
“On the other hand, RFID is a fantastic way to transform information from simple indicators into a digital record of condition. SpotSee has taken mechanical and chemical indicators, integrated them with RFID technology and delivered indicators that provide supply chain data points.”
SpotSee participates in the logistics aspects of several industries; SpotSee RFID indicators have been adopted by automotive, data center, aerospace customers to name a few. Soon, SpotSee will have a solution that is focused on the life science cold chain industry, as in May 2023, the company acquired Marathon Products, which specializes in temperature data loggers and monitors for ultra-low and high temperature applications, primarily for the life sciences market.
“Our mission is to connect our life science customers to the condition of their pharmaceuticals and diagnostics as they travel from manufacturer to patient,” said SpotSee CEO Tony Fonk about the acquisition of Marathon. “The Marathon acquisition gives SpotSee over 50 additional cost-effective solutions for monitoring temperature and humidity, including the best -80⁰C dry ice data logger on the market, which is ideal for ultra-cold chains.”
McWilliams noted that SpotSee integrates condition into passive RFID indicators.
“While some sensors have condition, they are either battery powered (therefore have a shorter shelf life, require a memory chip, and are more expensive) or they are passive (can only tell you the condition at the point in time they are scanned),” said McWilliams.
“For example, there are RFID enabled temperature tags but you either know the temperature at a moment in time not whether something happened over the course of the journey (passive RFID) or the tag has a battery to power the temperature sensor, memory to store the sensor information (active RFID) and is more costly. SpotSee solutions use mechanical/chemical memory to allow users to know what happened over the course of a supply chain.”
With that in mind, SpotSee is working on new product innovations.
“SpotSee has under development a passive RFID temperature indicator that delivers time over temperature information to supply chain participants… using chemistry,” said McWilliams. “This irreversible evidence of temperature excursion is delivered via near field communication (NFC), as well as visually, alerting supply chain participants that the monitored shipment has seen unacceptable temperature and creating an electronic data point at the moment of discovery when reading with a smart device.”