Key Development
Minneapolis-based Headwater Systems Inc. comes up with an innovative way to help an area college keep track of some important items.
BY TODD NELSON
Misplacing your house or car keys can be trouble enough. Now imagine losing the master keys to 50-some buildings on an 800-acre college campus.
That’s the challenge Luther College of Decorah, Iowa, has grapple dwith for years. For help, it recently turned to Headwater Systems Inc. of Minneapolis and its patented new RFID-based Watchdog system. The installation, which will monitor the movement of Luther’s master keys, is the company’s first application of the Watchdog system, and a sign of growing global interest in the active RFID technology it uses, says CEO Alex Fjelstad.
Each of the college’s master keywill be tagged with a small RF transmitter that periodically pings a receiver in the building where the key is supposed to be. The receiver will send data about the key to a computer server via an Ethernet connection. Users, in this case college security and facilities operations staff, will access an internal Web site that identifies where each key is on campus. Watchdog’s proprietary softwarewill show a key’s location both graphically, on a campus buildingmap, and in text.
The company is the only one in the Upper Midwest to offer such a system, to Fjelstad’s knowledge. Headwater Systems expects to install six to 10 Watchdog systems by year’s end, most of them in the Twin Cities metro area.
The product has undergone extensive redesign since the company formed in the mid-1990s, says Fjelstad. The original plan was to work with a hospital group on the East Coast to develop a tracking system for paper medical records. A prototype was developed, but the market dissolved in the late 1990s, as hospitals moved to electronic records systems.
Through the redesign, the transmitter tag evolved from something that initially looked like a floppy disc to a small black rectangle. The software and receivers also were updated, so the new Web-enabled system would work with Microsoft Windows and so the receivers would receive power as well as data via Ethernet connections.
Financing has come from private sources, Fjelstad says, much of it from his own pockets. The company also has used outside electrical engineers and software developers to develop the system, and a contractmanufacturer in Hibbing to produce it.
Demand for active RFID systems, also known as real-time location systems (RTLS) has grown in recent years, Fjelstad says, as businesses, hospitals and colleges, and other organizations seek to track and locate critical equipment and personnel. An industry report estimated the worldwide market for such systems would reach $7 billion 10 years from now.