RFID in Japan

Another Japanese city to be RFID'd is Aomori, located at the north end of the Japanese main island. It's a snowy city and a thick layer of snow on streets sometimes makes it hard for pedestriands to tell where a sidewalk is. It could be particularly hard for the eldery and handicapped people to get around in winter.

This is a project lead by the Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transport -- and Ken Sakamura of YRP Ubiquitous Networking Labs. is involved.
The idea is similar to the project in Kobe: to embed a number of RFID tags in streets and electric poles and use them to deliver information like "There is a crossing in front of you" or "You just reached the other end of a crosswalk" ...

This is a long-term project: the local goverment hopes to implement such a service in 10 years. A pilot test will start this fall.

I shouldn't forget to mention that Yuki means snow in Japanese.

via Asahi.com, April 12, 2005, in Japanese

Posted by konomi at April 18, 2005 03:03 AM | TrackBack