Japanese cram school uses RFID and SMS to track kids

Continuing the fine Japanese (and — let's be fair here — American) tradition of using RFID tags to let parents keep track of their kids, Tomas, a "cram school" (an after-school tutoring center), is now having students check in and out with RFID-enabled cards. And just to make sure parents know exactly what's going on, the school uses SMS to automatically inform parents when their kids have arrived and departed.  Cram school classes can run pretty late (witness the bleary-eyed kid in the Tomas illustration to the right), so parents may feel they have the right to know when their kids are coming home, but what ever happened to just asking them to call when they're leaving? Don't these kids have cell phones?

[J Mark Lytle @ Dec 19th 2005 1:38AM]

Interesting, slightly scary story. It's a minor point, but the alerts are sent via regular email to a cellphone or whatever -- SMS is a GSM thing...

[Vance @ Dec 19th 2005 1:38AM]

Its crazy! If the kids have RFID tags they should have cell phones- end of story.

[Joey Geraci @ Dec 19th 2005 1:38AM]

uh, sms can be sent out via either gsm or gprs, at least, and probably via the other wireless formats too.

[J Mark Lytle @ Dec 19th 2005 1:38AM]

Uh indeed Joey. SMS was originally a part of the GSM specification and GPRS is merely a GSM packet-switching data transmission technique. A pedandic point, I admit, but very different from the standard email mentioned in the (Japanese original) story.

If you're interested, here in Japan the only phones that can actually send and receive genuine SMS are the latest 3G mobiles from Vodafone -- they can be sent to handsets in other countries that actually use GSM. All very dull really...

[syarfa @ Dec 19th 2005 1:38AM]

i just want to know how its work. RFID operation, its programming, and so on.