Girton Enterprise Fellow and multi-award-winning academic and entrepreneur, Dr Sabesan Sithamparanathan FREng FIET, has invented and developed the world’s most accurate passive (battery-free) radio frequency identification (RFID) tracking technology.
The Impact of TrackMaster Technology
The digitisation of retail, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics and supply chain processes means that IoT, smart sensors and other AI driven processes are becoming increasingly prevalent. However, the smallest data inaccuracies can have the most profound operational, safety and security consequences and so existing inventory tracking solutions are typically not fit for purpose because they cannot detect and track tagged items with the required accuracy at speed.
Based on his PhD at Cambridge, Sabesan founded PervasID which has developed the world’s most accurate passive RFID real-time location tracking solution that achieves a 99%+ accuracy rate with up to 20 metre detection range, compared to that of the industry standard 80% accuracy with a 2 metre range. Already adopted by major retailers globally, this technology enhances retail inventory management by accurately tracking goods in retail stores using existing tags, replacing time-consuming, labour-intensive manual handheld scanning. Integrated with third-party stock management applications giving retailers a graphical map interface showing the location and movement of all tagged goods, the solution improves sales, customer satisfaction, and prevents losses by offering real-time visibility, timely restocking, efficient in-store fulfilment, enhanced click-and-collect and online order services. Furthermore, it can improve full-price sales and decrease end-of-season markdowns.
In industrial sector, Stanley Black & Decker use the tags to track supplies from their tool cabinets used by aircraft manufacturers. Each cabinet contains over 1,000 tools, and it can result in serious safety incidents if any are left inside an aircraft. It is estimated that Foreign Object Debris (FOD) costs the aviation industry $13 billion per year in direct and indirect costs, including flight delays, plane changes and fuel inefficiencies. In healthcare, PervasID solutions are being deployed in NHS hospitals for tracking surgical instruments to enhance decontamination and sterilisation processes and for tracking hospital assets to ensure that mission-critical medical devices are available at the right place and time, for robust and efficient care. The need for this level of traceability of medical devices has been particularly evident in the COVID-19 pandemic. The solution is predicted to save billions of pounds for hospitals globally and, most importantly, will save lives.
