National Guard uses RFID to track people, property

WebTech Wireless, a provider of location-based and fleet telematics services, provided the Texas National Guard with its wireless Quadrant system as part of an evacuation-communication system designed to keep track of evacuated residents during natural disasters. The National Guard allocated radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags to keep track of people, pets and medical supplies in the event of evacuation and equipped buses with evacuation-communication kits in portable cases that included the company’s WT5000 locator, a laptop, an external vehicle battery, Symbol Technology’s RFID reader and a cellular phone. The company said each person, pet or medical supply kit assigned with an RFID tag has their information entered into a central database as they board evacuation buses. The locator then transmits the exact location of each bus every minute, enabling the Quadrant system to update the database and let administrators keep track of evacuees.