Retail was an early adopter of RAIN technology, Aileen Ryan, President and CEO of the RAIN Alliance told IoT Insider in a recent podcast episode, but emerging industries like healthcare and pharmaceuticals are exploring the benefits of deploying RAIN technology too.
The acceleration of RAIN technology in the last decade
RAIN technology is a passive, ultra-high-frequency battery-free technology that uses a tag, also known as a chip, attached or embedded into an item, and a reader to identify that tag and track it. Because the chip needs to be attached to an item – which can be anything from a t- shirt to medicine – the different form factors need to be taken into consideration.
“The technology has been around for 20 years and the people who have been working with the technology for 20 years, but it’s really been in the last decade that it’s become commercially viable,” Ryan shared. “When we look at early deployment a decade ago, there may have been a couple of billion tags shipped that year … In 2021 there were 45 billion RAIN tags shipped globally.”
The reasons behind this acceleration can be related to the evolution in the technology: “When we look back 15, 16 years ago, the chip size for a RAIN chip was bigger than one square centimetre … in technology terms that’s quite big. That size now is 0.7 square millimetres. The read range 15 years ago would have been about three metres, and now it can be up to 25 metres depending on the circumstance.”
This showed the maturation of RAIN as well as becoming a tried-and-tested technology people know they can deploy – and the question has shifted from ‘How does RAIN technology work?’ to ‘How is it going to help the individual use case?’
Emerging use cases
Ryan referred to retail as the “first big deployment of RAIN technology,” primarily apparel and footwear, with the early use cases focused on inventory: being able to track what items are in stock and what aren’t, replacing manual forms of checking which were labour-intensive.
“Now that companies have deployed RAIN to optimise their inventory systems and processes they’re saying, ‘I’ve already invested in this technology. What else can I do?’” explained Ryan. “There is a really compelling return on investment in logistics, the transportation of packages.
“Logistics companies are instrumenting their vehicles so that they know exactly what’s on board a vehicle and can optimise the routing of their vehicles based on the destination of the packages that are on board, and so on.”
Healthcare and pharmaceuticals are exploring deploying RAIN to stop the diversion of drugs and make sure they get to the patients that they’re meant for, rather than being sold on the black market. “What they’re [hospitals] doing is not only are they using RAIN to track the quantity of the drugs they have in the hospital and where they’re located, but also are sharing that information amongst all the other hospitals so everyone is confident if they’re running low, they can share inventory.”
Driving adoption of RAIN
Ryan noted that penetration rates of RAIN remain pretty low – but putting a positive spin on things, meant that there was still room for the technology to grow.
“One barrier [to adoption] is the form factors are different, and some are more challenging than others. Pharmaceuticals is a very compelling use case, but it’s subject to distortion,” said Ryan. “If it’s in close proximity to glass or liquids of different viscosity or a piece of metal, something like that.”
Another barrier affecting adoption as Ryan saw it was that no two deployments were the same. “It’s not possible to do a cookie cutter approach that says, take this and it’ll work,” she said. “At the RAIN Alliance we’re trying to share stories of different use cases that have been done as broadly as we can.”
By knowledge sharing among the community, the hope is for companies or individuals trying out RAIN deployments in their use case to not feel discouraged by the possibility that the use case has never been tried before.
“We see the diversity of RAIN deployments as incredible and very inspiring,” she concluded.
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