Items Tag › matthart

We have a great patent submission, approval and filing process here at Intuit. But of the ideas that I’ve submitted that were not approved, I have a few I want to disclose. We had a “disclosure journal” blog on our older innovation.intuit.com website, but, well, it was pretty stagnant. Still, publishing puts the ideas into the open community and helps prevent future attempts to patent, so I thought I’d publish a few. I was on an RFID run for a while, and one of my ideas was to embed RFID tags into underground PVC pipes. That way they could be found and mapped, because unlike steel pipes, you can’t use a metal detector. An idea that Tara and I submitted was RFID form stickers - creating a form that had built-in stickers that were associated with that form. So, for instance, you could have a work order with several stickers - just pull off a sticker and attach to job items, and they’d be automatically associated with that job - no other computer entry or forms required. One idea that morphed into a filed patent was measuring bulk rolled materials such as fabric. It is difficult to know the exact amount remaining, but if you had a roll of RFID tape/tags in the material, you could automatically measure the amount remaining based on the detection of the “length” indicating tag. When you have lots of active (can be read from a distance) RFID tags, you might want more precise location using a reader - e.g. a reader at one table/station instead of a different one. So the idea was to put adjustable “blinders” on a reader so that you could focus it’s readability on a particular station. When talking to one set of customers, we learned about the problem of dispensing drugs to nursing home patients. Care givers often aren’t legally able to directly dispense drugs, so instead, they have blister packs of daily doses that they give to their wards, who are then “dispensing” their own medications. The problem is around knowing when you need to reorder, so put RFID tags on each blister dosage, and count the tags remaining. Then your computer system would know when to reorder as well as whether or not dosages have been properly dispensed. I also wanted to stick active RFID tags into a badge, so when you walk around a large facility, the badge could activate “signs” guiding you to your destination. I thought of a way to customize the read distance - by putting layers of blocking materials on a tag that could be peeled away. One idea that was, well, cool to me if not Intuit, was to put RFID tags in the shoes of athletes, with readers on the playing surface. You could track where any given person was, even in relation to the “ball”, and virtually recreate the entire game, show only certain players, etc… What a tool for coaches! Or at least I think it would be a cool tool… I wanted to put an RFID reader in a regular stamp, e.g. “VOID” or “PAID”. The stamp would read the RFID information on the form and send the “form status” to the system. So you stamp “SHIPPED” on a form and immediately the system knows that the item has been shipped. Ben H and I came up with a way to help manage, or at least track, the workload of someone like a tax preparer. The amount of work is often determined by the “pile” - inbox piles, incoming, ready to prepare, needs more info, etc… If each folder had a tag, possibly indicating the approximate amount of work (by using a large/medium/small folder), then placing the folders in a basket containing an RFID reader could let a system approximate the amount of work to be done. Tara and I wanted to patent a tablecloth with an RFID reader - so similar to smart “tables”, it would be a smart tablecloth, able to know what was placed on it. I guess that’s it for the ones that I filed but weren’t approved. The ones I like the best are the tablecloth and the workload detection. - Matt H

matthart

Cornucopia of RFID ideas

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