Pfizer Learns by Doing with RFID

By Paul Thomas, Managing Editor Ambient moisture and humidity are also thought to impact signal strength and thus read rates. While pharmaceutical production and warehousing areas tend to be humidity-controlled, have you had any issues along these lines? This is a fact and I believe there are even some published test reports available. We’ve not had issues to date and not likely to within our four walls. Pharmaceuticals need to be kept within controlled temperatures and humidity throughout the entire supply chain. It’s a bit more environmentally friendly than consumer goods sitting in warehouses with no temp or humidity control. Have you been testing RFID (either HF or UHF) on blister packs and other types of packages, and if so, have you experienced readability challenges? We’ve done some exploratory testing with HF on blister packs and even Rolaids (roll of tablets in a foil liner). In general, we would seek to minimize changes to packaging wherever possible and balance the needs of business and RFID performance. The challenges will be to economically get the tag on the package in a location conducive to managing the effects of metal content. You can try and fight the fact that there is metal present. However, a better approach is to take into account the metal content and properly tune the tag. This is an old trick used on some EAS theft-deterrent labels. A problem can occur, however, where the tag will then not work properly in the absence of metal — which makes scalability an issue. Metal is more of an issue with UHF because even though you can tune UHF tags, metal still reflects the propagating wave component of near-field UHF. Thus you get RF in places you don’t want it. How much have you learned about optimizing RFID read rates through trial