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A group of German researchers developed a mobile shopping assistant consisting of a PDA and a plug-in RFID reader to help customers and sales staff quickly obtain information about the goods on the shelf.
“We hope that shoppers can obtain detailed digital information while seeing the entity of the product,” said Tobias Kowatsch, a person in charge of the SmaProN project operation and empirical research at Furtwangen University in Germany. SmaProN stands for Smart Product Networks.
This system is called “Tip’n Tell” and is designed to make the store’s products more attractive. A passive high frequency (13.56 MHz) RFID tag is affixed to each product, and the tag complies with the ISO 15693 standard. The user brings the PDA equipped with an RFID reader close to the product, the reader reads the product tag, and transmits the tag ID number to the database via WLAN. The database then transmits the product information to the PDA and displays it on the screen.
Users can get further information by touching the PDA screen. For example, if the labeled product is clothing, customers can get the price of clothing, accessories, videos, and other user reviews through the PDA.
“Because we only read the ID number of the tag and no other data is needed, the high-frequency tag is sufficient to meet our needs,” said Andreas Filler, a research assistant at the University’s Intelligent Media (RCIM) Center. “In general, we can use any tag that can be read at close range.”
“By integrating EPC information into the shopping process, the customer’s shopping experience can be improved,” Filler said. “For example, a customer can use the PDA to find out if the jeans he is interested in are available in other sizes, and if there are such sizes in the existing sales and warehouses. If not, it will take a few days to arrive.This system is similar to the smart mirror developed by the Metro store, except that Tip’n Tell is movable. The designer hopes that most commercial mobile phones will have RFID functions in the future, so that every mobile phone can be used as a mobile shopping assistant.
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