Paul Muller, Leader of the RAIN Reader Smartphone Integration Working Group, shares insight into a recent RAIN in Smartphones Use Case Workshop, held as part of the IEEE RFID Annual Conference.

Each year, the IEEE Council on RFID hosts its annual IEEE RFID Conference, bringing manufacturers, vendors, end users and other industry leaders together with leading academics and researchers in the field to discuss the latest innovative developments and use cases for RFID technology. I was thrilled to be invited to attend this year’s edition in Atlanta, USA, hosted at one of the country’s foremost universities for engineering and computer science – Georgia Tech.

I had the opportunity to co-lead a workshop with Samin Aayanifard, Research Engineer at Impinj, where we held a brainstorm on new use cases enabled by RAIN reader integration into smartphones – with more than 40 participants ranging from fresh graduates to industry experts and tenured academics from across the world.

For 90 minutes, the room was buzzing with enthusiasm and ideas as we discussed our concepts, their value creation and monetization strategies. Our audience contributed over 50 proposals from a host of different ecosystems, each of which added to the growing scope of RAIN in smartphones. Of these, we thought we’d share five flagship examples:

  • Seamless In-Store Shopping

As consumers, we identified what we want our smartphones to enable as part of the in-store experience. Three key desirable features dominated the conversation – the first being to quickly locate desired items, removing the need to wander the aisles looking for a specific product not knowing if it’s even in stock. While selecting items for the shopping cart when grocery shopping, we would also appreciate suggestions for accompanying products to recreate popular recipes at home. Most importantly, we would like to eliminate queuing at the checkout, with self-checkout enabled through our smartphones. Removing the need to queue at a busy checkout, especially at peak times, directly addresses one of the main points of friction for in-store purchasing, resulting in higher conversion rates.

  • Figure out the food shop

We also discussed how RAIN integration in smartphones could help busy professionals optimize our shopping lists. By using our smartphones to scan the contents of our fridge, it would be great to know what items we currently have in there; if there are perishables that are either close to going out of date or already expired; recipe suggestions for the ingredients currently available; and the ability to re-order our favorite products.

  • Helping to ‘nail’ DIY

Thinking as avid DIY’ers, being able to use our smartphones to identify and locate the tools either at home or in the garage would help ensure we can find everything needed to complete the job quickly and easily. If completing a job away from home, the ability to scan the load space of our van or truck would also help ensure that all tools are accounted for before leaving, using a smartphone to complete a quick inventory scan of tagged tools.

  • Helping with Healthcare

We also put ourselves into the shoes of a patient managing a chronic condition and self-administering medication at home. In this scenario, we would like the ability to use our smartphones to scan all medication kept in our cabinet to manage expiry dates and stay on top of inventory. This would enable patients to ensure that medications are always re-ordered on time to avoid gaps in prescriptions and give visibility to health insurance providers, enabling lower premiums.

  • Effortless Events Management

Finally, we considered the position of an event manager and how RAIN in smartphones could help make event entry control more seamless. Security staff could use their work smartphone to read event attendees’ RAIN-enabled wristbands, reducing venue queues and enabling integration with event apps to enhance the visitor experience once inside.

The Role of RAIN Alliance and the Value of Collaboration

We were delighted with the enthusiasm in the room throughout the full session, with discussions spilling over into lunch break and the rest of the day. This is a testament to the excitement that RAIN reader smartphone integration is generating and its transformative potential, not just for our industry and our end user base but also for the general public.

This is why we’re so keen to hear from as many people as possible. We want to make sure that RAIN reader smartphone integration enables countless use cases that make a difference in all of our daily lives. The RAIN Alliance is working hard to help make deployment and integration seamless, bringing together technical and market experts to champion the use of RAIN technology, creating a smarter and more sustainable world.

Learn more about becoming a part of RAIN Alliance and making your voice heard here.