Scenario # 1 It was a tiring 10 hours journey but finally Ali was home. The airport was very busy and retrieving the luggage was a nightmare. The thought of luggage reminded him of taking out his important documents from the suitcase and putting them at a secure place. As he approached the lock of the suitcase he immediately felt that there was something wrong. It didn't take much time to be sure that Ali had brought home the wrong suitcase. The guy at the checkout also did a poor job by not correctly reading the attached tag and allowing Ali to go.
While pondering on the possible solutions now, he noticed a logo with barcodes at one of the handles of the suitcase. It read ‘efound,info – please visit me if I am found lost’. Visiting the efound.info website makes him install the free efound app on his smart phone and scanning the logo through the app’s barcodes scanner. The scanning reveals that the suitcase is declared as lost by the owner who also gives his contact information. Finding a lost luggage had never been that easy.
Scenario # 2 While coming back from the local park after an evening walk, Natasha felt a shiver of cold and realized she had left her shawl on the bench she sat for a few minutes. It was an expensive Kashmiri shawl given to her by her mother. The sentimental value of this shawl, however, was much greater than the material value. Since she recently got registered with ‘efound’, she didn’t feel too worried as there was a good chance that, if falling into honest hands, the efound NFC tag stitched on the shawl would be scanned by the finder and she would be contacted by that person for her to collect the shawl. Thanks to ‘efound’ to whom she recently got registered and was provided with a few NFC tags, the IDs of which she registered on ‘efound.info’ against her contact information and the items carrying these tags.
Thinking of that, she takes out her smart phone starts the ‘efound’ app, logs-in through her username and password, and updates the status of her shawl’s NFC ID as ‘LOST’ on ‘efound.info’. Soon after that her phone rings and a friendly voice greets her.
“Hello, is that Miss Natasha speaking?” asked the voice.
“Yes Natasha here”, answers she.
“Oh good evening Natasa! This is Amer here, I just scanned the efound NFC tag attached to a shawl I found on the bench in our local park and my ‘efound’ app pulled out your contact details. Would you be able to come and collect your belonging or shall I post it to your address?”, says the voice.
Scenario # 3 Breaking news: The Capital Development Authority (CDA) has made it mandatory for any vehicle entering the red zone (area around the parliament and prime minister house) to have an RFID embedded number plate. The vehicles passing through the RFID reader mounted barriers would automatically be considered suspicious if its RFID chip in the number plate doesn’t get registered while passing through the barriers. This order has come after a car passing through one of the RFID readers mounted barriers in a busy shopping area of Islamabad got registered as ‘stolen’ on the monitor and an alarm rang alerting the police to stop the car and arrest the thieves who later were confirmed as suicide bombers approaching the nearby square to blow themselves up. Thanks to ‘efound’ which provided the car owner with RFID chips hidden inside a secret but readable part of the car. When the car was not found in the parking lot the owner immediately changed the status of the embedded chip on ‘efound.info’ to ‘STOLEN’. He did that only through a couple of SMS’s as the internet was not available at that time. Since the ‘efound’ application on the capital police RFID monitor was also connected to the ‘efound’ server it rang the alarm as soon as the car passed through the RFID mounted barriers. The government is now also considering having a bigger contract with ‘efound’ to implement this system nationwide.
What is ‘efound’? efound.info provides services for mediation between owner of a good and the one who aims to trace this ownership. It allows the user to scan QR codes, barcodes, NFC tag or an RFID tag and read or write information against the tag ID in the central database. This application is developed in php and android.
efound has two types of user interfaces one web and the other an android app. It allows the registered user to upload the possession’s information or status in the efound database. The amount of information to be revealed through scanning is the discretion of the registered user. The service has an application over a wide range of information tractability problems including, those of
- passengers, travelling documents, luggage at the airport,
- patient files, medicines, equipment at a hospitals,
- retail products in a superstore
- automobiles and other assets for normal users and organizations, and
- weapon and other identifications by government security agencies.
Github link for PHP: https://github.com/codeforpakistan/efound/ Github link for Android:
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