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High tech in the weirdest places

Information Age staff, Information Age

23/10/2007 00:09:23

But what about when those same technologies show up where you least expect them? When your business is to cure the body of ailments, or to turn back the clock on a culture's waning heritage, or to keep a herd of cattle happily milked -- where does all this enterprise technology get you?

In some cases, surprisingly far.

From the battlefield to the esophagus to the college cafeteria, these 11 organizations are putting enterprise technology to unusual use -- proving IT is equally adept at solving problems in the server closet as it is in the strangest places.

IT-enabled self-service cow milking

By Curtis Franklin Jr.

A boon to the dairy farmer's bottom line, dairy cows' constant milk production is a bane to farmhand productivity, as one fact rules every dairy farmer's life: Cows must be milked. Twice. Every day.

So great is this bovine workflow tyranny that DeLaval, a Swiss dairy technology supplier, has constructed an innovative technological solution that relieves farmers of this duty and places the onus of milking essentially on the cows themselves.

True to the Web 2.0 end-user empowerment formula of many of today's emergent technologies, DeLaval's VMS (voluntary milking system) puts the cows in charge of their own milking schedules. Each cow is outfitted with an RFID collar. When the cow enters the milking shed, the tag is scanned, providing the VMS with information about the cow's expected production and medical requirements. The cow enters a milking stall, and a gate lowers over its neck to keep it in place. To keep the cow happy during its temporary milking confinement, feed is provided, complete with the necessary medications and nutritional supplements. The corporate workstation metaphor is apt, if thin.

The cow now occupied, the VMS swings into action. The cow's udder and teats are washed with an antiseptic cleanser and are air-dried, after which a robotic arm swings a group of teat cups into place. The cups find their proper location through what DeLaval calls a "high-performance teat visualization system" that employs a camera and dual lasers to aid in proper positioning. Each cow is milked according to its expected output and is then washed and dried once again before being released to head back out to the pasture.

Once out of the cow, the milk is robotically handled according to health regulations and stored until pickup by the dairy co-op or wholesaler. The entire process within the milking barn is dealt with by robots controlled by information from an information-rich database. Consider it a highly specialized BI silo, one that when coupled with the VMS's robotic architecture lends dairy farmers considerable competitive milking advantage.

Fingerprinting to fend off food fights

By David L Margulius

Remember the cafeteria scene in Animal House when Bluto (John Belushi) cuts the line and proceeds to stuff his tray (and mouth) with everything from Jell-O to bananas to mashed potatoes, generally causing mayhem, and even taking a bite of a sandwich and then putting it back?

Now imagine Bluto having to disable a secure biometric point-of-sale system before running amok in the cafeteria, and you can understand why this scene will not likely be repeated at Sawtry Community College in Cambridgeshire, England.

The college recently installed a cafeteria management solution from Toshiba and Datasym incorporating a fingerprint sign-on and rules engine allowing it to increase throughput and provide more visibility into and control over student consumption during the busy lunch break.

The system replaced an existing smart-card setup that was costly because students kept losing the cards and the readers kept breaking down. The school had also recently gone from two lunch breaks to one, resulting in throughput logjams at the registers.

The new system enables students or their parents to upload money to their accounts before lunch, then sign in with the fingerprint reader before making their food selections. It gives parents a better idea of what their kids are eating (Bluto would not approve), and it can flag food items that students may be allergic to.

Planned enhancements to the system include functionality to give parents the ability to remotely limit what their kids can spend on any given meal, as well as a tracking system to generate detailed inventory reports to improve procurement planning and reduce waste.

As for a map mashup for overlaying the trajectories of items thrown in an Animal House-esque consumables melee, well, that just might have to wait for a Google Food Fight API.

Tapping game tech to save lives

By Jeff Angus

When some 22nd-century civilisation exhumes our 2007 use of technologies, it will no doubt hold symposia on why turn-of-the-millennium life-saving applications -- trailing the profitability of entertainment gadgets -- had to borrow technology from teenagers' cootie-blasting video game consoles.

Today's video game and HDTV markets are in large part defined by the graphics capabilities of GPU (graphics processing unit) multithreaded cell processors, such as PlayStation 3's RSX from Nvidia and the Cell Microprocessor from the IBM-Toshiba-Sony consortium.

But although the culture's passion for bringing down Shinra or watching Celebrity Poker Showdown reruns in high definition justifies vendors' investments in optimising complex graphics processing, an inadvertent beneficiary of this billion-dollar R&D industry is high-speed 3-D image rendering, such as that used in the medical industry.

The processing required to synthesize dozens of medical images to create a navigable 3-D representation is not unlike that used in action games. So when IBM and the Mayo Clinic announced at IEEE earlier this year that they could move medical imaging into the fourth dimension -- that is, time -- it should have come as no surprise that game technology was behind it.

The Mayo Clinic's Image Registration Application aggregates an interpreter's viewing changes over time to depict subjects such as tumours. Using chips developed for entertainment, that app can now render data nearly 50 times faster -- cutting diagnosis times dramatically.

The Mayo Clinic is by no means alone in using game technology to save lives. Last year, Mercury Computer announced it would be using the IBM-Toshiba-Sony consortium's GPU designs to produce medical-related imaging hardware.

And with companies such as Rapidmind building non-game-oriented development platforms for leveraging multi-core hardware, expect medical software to further its altruistic use of technology funded in large part by our desire to be entertained.

Ensuring nut freshness with RFID

By David L Margulius

Somewhere along the line, every ICT manager has had a nutcase to deal with. None likely are as daunting as the one faced every year by Paramount Farms, the world's largest grower and processor of almonds and pistachios.

Pistachios in particular are a tough nut to crack because their ultra-short six-week autumn harvest season requires super-efficient processing of as much as 10 million kilos of nuts per day. This means receiving loads of nuts from 400 participating growers; weighing the nuts and sampling for quality; and then cleaning, hulling, drying and packaging them.

Furthermore, the potential for damage to or discolouration of the nuts from the moment they're mechanically shaken off the tree until they're fully processed is quite high, placing a huge premium on speed and efficiency. Heat in particular can spoil the nuts en route to the plant or while waiting to be processed.

Paramount's solution: deploy an RFID system as part of an overall software suite to manage the flow of nuts from tree through to processing. With software from Microsoft and RFID components from Intermec, Paramount set up a system that pinpoints crucial information as each truckload arrives -- which grower sent the nuts, what the harvest method was, the load's current temperature and total weight. This data is then relayed to workers carrying handheld units who can prioritise the processing of each load accordingly.

"If a load's at a very high temperature, say, over 30degC, which could speed up spoilage, they reroute it to the front of the line to get processed," explains Chris Kelly, Intermec director of RFID business development. The system is geared to reduce "turn time", Paramount's primary operational metric.

"It's basically fleet management RFID," Kelly says. "They were looking to get more efficiency out of the facilities they had, because their business is like the retail Christmas season -- it's very peaky."

And, thanks to high tech in an arid agrarian setting, the pistachio harvest season is a little less nutty.

Combating plant extinction with PDAs

By Brian Chee

To the road warrior, the PDA is an essential tether to the enterprise -- one on which any given sales call may ultimately depend. But to the thousands of endangered plant species across the globe, an enterprise-ready handheld might just prove the difference between existence and extinction.

SenseIT, a Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant program undertaken by the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory in conjunction with the botany and computer science departments at the University of Hawaii, was launched to create a self-organising, self-healing micro-sensor network that could be used to monitor endangered plant species in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

Because the unwritten rule of technical research gathering in national parks is, "If you can see it, it can't be there", the group -- which, full disclosure, I was a part of -- had to think outside the box and opted to hide its micro-sensors in fake rocks and tree branches we called PODS.

The micro-sensors themselves were constructed from off-the-shelf Compaq iPaq PDAs, loaded with the Familiar Linux distribution. The group implemented a custom gradient-routing variation of the 802.11b ad-hoc wireless protocol to equip the networked micro-sensors with self-healing and self-organising functionality. Tucked safely in their PODS, these PDA-based micro-sensors were then placed along the Chain of Craters Road within Volcanoes National Park, from the rain forest to the desert of the west rift zone.

Waking up once an hour, the iPaq PODS snapped high-resolution digital images of targeted endangered plants. The micro-sensors bundled this image with various environmental measurements -- wind speed, temperature, and so on -- and beamed it all to a Postgres database over an encrypted link.

The modularity of the approach -- tapping your everyday PDA -- was essential in capturing a wide array of vital information about the status of plants whose populations are waning. Essential as well were the fake rocks used to house the micro-sensors. So convincing was the camouflage that, at one point during the research gathering exercise, photographs of a film crew resting on the crater rim were taken by the "rocks" around them without arousing their suspicion.

Next time you're in Volcanoes, beware, you never know when a PDA might just be watching.

Vegetation taps VoIP to voice its needs

By Jeff Angus

Current studies indicate that working with or in proximity of plant life increases productivity and inspires a more upbeat demeanour. In fact, horticultural therapy has become a common component of the rehabilitation and coping regimens of persons afflicted with cancer or autism, for example.

But for ICT departments looking to harness the feel-good productivity power of plants without distracting patients, er, staff from their primary IT duties, there's Botanicalls, a VoIP-based service that enables plants to phone their human partners as needed and describe their tending needs in detail.

At the core of this "Feed me, Seymour" architecture are a half-dozen open source tools, including Digium's Asterisk, the open source VoIP platform that ultimately lends voice to plants' pleas.

Here's how Botanicalls works: light and moisture sensors on the plant communicate to an embedded system programmed in Arduino, an open source electronics prototyping platform for hardware and software. When a plant's micro-controller determines that the plant needs to phone for help, it makes use of Xbee and Xport open source RF communication equipment to contact a PHP script with the plant's ID number and specific need.

The PHP script then packages information about the specific plant stored in the database and passes it on to Asterisk. The call is placed to the plant's caregiver by Asterisk, which plays an audio file in the "voice" of the plant expressing its need.

"It's so exciting to see how people can use our technology so creatively," says Mark Spencer, CTO of Digium, and Asterisk's creator.

Asterisk's VoIP chops, traditionally used for automated call processing for call centre or queuing applications, has attracted some innovative applications through the years, including a bicycle-powered phone.

Few, however, are as eccentric as this one, which opens the door to a stew of emergent vegetableware solutions, not to mention the possibility of a burgeoning social-networking-fuelled MyPot community platform.

Clearing the fog of war with text messaging

By Jeff Angus

Regardless of one's stance on armed conflict, the death of servicemen by friendly fire is a troubling eventuality of war that stirs a very high level of discomfort in all. In the confusion of battle, the risk of being wounded or killed by comrades-in-arms is by no means trivial, and while the Pentagon states that the rate of deaths by friendly fire has diminished in recent conflicts, it still occurs in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This risk is compounded when coalition forces include multiple services or troops from multiple countries, as the coordination of manoeuvres and means of identification becomes that much more complex.

The Friendly Force Tracking application currently being sold to the Department of Defense by WinMagic and Comtech Mobile Data applies a large number of emergent technologies, including text messaging, to decrease the likelihood of friendly fire deaths by helping allies keep informed of plans and positions in near real time.

The Friendly Force Tracking system deploys mobile battlefield terminals that use WinMagic's latest password and PKI encryption methods in its SecureDoc full-disk encryption software to limit access to only authenticated users. It also applies Comtech Mobile Data's collaborative GPS-based GeoOps software to integrate mission planning, dispatching, and movement monitoring.

Moreover, the system integrates text messaging to facilitate the identification of friendly forces.

As with any machine-based military application, text messaging as a means for ally identification can only be as effective as soldiers can manage under duress. But if there is one war issue this country can reach consensus about, it is certain to be that reducing friendly fire deaths is a worthwhile objective.

Mobile phones to cure road rage?

By David L Margulius

Ever wonder why traffic reports are so wrong so often and what can be done about it? The answer may be in your mobile phone.

Most traffic data today -- other than the helicopter fly-over variety -- is collected by roadside sensors that cost thousands per kilometre to install and maintain, according to Tom Bouwer, vice president of sales and marketing at AirSage. Bouwer's company has developed a cheaper solution, which he claims will soon make accurate traffic data widely available for a host of very cool applications.

"What you hear on the radio today is incident data," Bouwer explains. "It doesn't tell you severity or impact on travel times." Moreover, only a small proportion of driving routes in the US are currently covered by sensors, he said, out of the hundreds of thousands of miles of primary and secondary roads in major population areas.

AirSage plans to use "anonymous signalling data" from drivers' mobile phones, working in partnership with major mobile phone carriers (the company already has a contract with Sprint Nextel). The heart of the solution is a "black box" that will go beyond simple cell-tower triangulation, running a series of algorithms on the wireless signals to determine cars' speed and location. But the system doesn't use the built-in GPS tracking capabilities now required by law for mobile phones because that would eat up too much of the carriers' network bandwidth.

Bouwer says the traffic data will then be delivered to all kinds of users, including government planners, travel information programs, handheld and on-dash navigation systems, mobile phone applications, and the media.

"This is actually a very disruptive technology," says Bouwer, who claims that when fully deployed it will enable innovative applications, including real-time routing to reduce congestion and commute times.

Other potential benefits could include more coordinated evacuations in case of regional emergencies, Bouwer explains. "In Katrina, they didn't have a regionwide view of traffic conditions, which would have enabled a much more efficient evacuation of people and better identification of pockets of non-compliance," he says.

Of course, all of this data is anonymous, Bouwer insists. And although no system is 100 per cent accurate, he thinks the system will be good enough to make a notable difference in peoples' lives. "People look at accuracy as kph differences across speed bands," he explains. "For a 20-minute morning drive, you don't care if it's 10 per cent slower at 22 minutes, but you do if it's 25 or 26 or 27."

RFID spells reflux relief

By Jeff Angus

Some innovators view RFID as a means for accelerating the enterprise supply chain with minimal human intervention. Others tout it for keeping tabs on us all more precisely as part of a totalitarian utopia of citizens "chipped" with an embedded national ID.

And then there are those who believe RFID is the key to finding a cure for gastroesophageal reflux disease.

It's not as sexy as Agent Jack Bauer tracking down baddies to torture, but for the estimated 19 million American sufferers of reflux, RFID implants embedded in research subjects' esophagi might lead to much-desired relief. If successful, the research by Dr Shou Jiang Tang and Dr Fred Tibbals, of the Southwestern Medical Center at the University of Texas, could slash the $US9.3 billion spent every year on prevention techniques and improved treatments.

The technique pins an RFID chip to the esophagus to track stomach acids. Combined with an impedance monitor, the system tests for electrical impulses that signal acidic or non-acidic liquids moving through the esophagus.

The system then transmits this data to a wireless sensor worn around the neck. The data is later analysed against other data the subjects collect. How and what they eat, when they sleep and are active are all integrated with the collected esophageal liquids data to obtain a more complete picture of factors contributing to the disease.

Moreover, the implanted RFID system replaces that old tried-and-true piece of medical equipment: a flexible catheter tube threaded through the nose and down into the esophagus.

Prior to RFID, reflux testing was very uncomfortable for the subjects, Dr Tang says, adding that results can be biased using the old method because the catheter alters the way patients eat.

Dr Tang and Dr Tibbals believe the flexible RFID system will make it easier for patients to follow their normal eating and activity patterns that may affect the condition.

And if their research yields the kinds of results that will help prevent and treat the ailment, the supply chain to the stomach will have one fewer pain point to contend with, thanks to RFID.

Raw fish ID

By David L Margulius

When James Allard lived in Japan as a student in the 1990s, he frequented kaiten sushi restaurants, which keep prices low by circulating dishes on a conveyor belt rather than making nigiri, sashimi and sushi rolls to order. The problem he observed was that dishes stayed on the belt too long, losing freshness and becoming unappetising.

So when Allard and a partner opened their first kaiten-style Blue C Sushi restaurant in Seattle in 2003, they implemented a barcode system that notified them when a plate had been on the conveyor more than 90 minutes, so they could remove it.

But that wasn't good enough for Allard, a former technology entrepreneur. In 2006, following the lead of Wal-Mart, the Department of Defense, and other large enterprises, tiny Blue C Sushi installed RFID technology so it could precisely monitor which dishes people were buying, at what time of day, and how long they stayed on the conveyor belt.

The system, now running in two locations, consists of RFID tags made by 3M fixed on the bottom of each plate, Intermec RFID readers and antennas, Microsoft's BizTalk RFID event processing platform, and Ebisu inventory management software from local integrator Kikata.

RFID antennas are placed at the chefs' cutting boards so they can designate which dish goes on which plate, and also around the conveyor belt to read tag information from the passing plates.

"They're beginning to see some nice operational payoff, building a database of time of day and year and what people want," says Chris Kelly, Intermec director of RFID business development, who worked on the project. "They're getting better demographics on consumption. It's a novel use of the technology."

Each chef has a touchscreen display to show what's selling in real time, Kelly says. Moreover, Kelly adds, the system automates the billing process, resulting in fewer errors on customer's bills and fewer unpaid bills.