IC-Tagged Vegetables on Sale

The T-Engine Forum, a Japanese nonprofit organization that is developing an operating-system named TRON, has conducted research and development of what it calls Ubiquitous ID technology, which enables the automatic recognition of any tagged objects and the display of desired information. The Ubiquitous ID Center, under the auspices of the T-Engine Forum, has been doing the first feasibility trial since 2003.

The Center started the in-store trial in January 2004, to test a Product Traceability System Using Ubiquitous ID Technology developed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, in its production phase. The test was performed for about a month, using about 30,000 packages of vegetables.

At the farm level, the production histories of vegetables are collected by the "Ubiquitous Communicator," a mobile device that reads electronic tags and barcodes specified by the Ubiquitous ID Center, and when each product is distributed, an attached tag called "ucode," can record distribution information. During the trial, the ID-tagged vegetables were sold to consumers at three shops run by Keikyu Store, one of Japan's major railway and supermarket chains. Consumers could confirm the production histories and distribution information of the vegetables by reading the ucodes through Ubiquitous Communicators and in-store displays.

Note: "ucode" refers to the unique ubiquitous identification numbers that are recorded using ubiquitous computing technology.

http://www.t-engine.org/index.html

Posted: 2004/03/31 10:47:09 PM
Japanese version