D7.7: RFID, Profiling, and AmI

Title: THE LINKAGE BETWEEN AMI, PROFILING AND RFID

A number of systems known today can be understood as forerunner technologies or basic enablers for AmI. Examples are: 

1. RFID systems*,  

2. Biometric systems, and  

3. Location based services (LBS) using mobile devices.  

Profiling, which enables the detection of significant patterns in the data collected by means of these technologies, can include autonomic, real time decision making that is the conditio sine qua non for an AmI environment. Especially RFID systems* are - from an abstracted technical perspective - very similar to future AmI-systems. The similarities become obvious by comparing with generic RFID systems* (c.f. ):

Figure : Scheme of a generic RFID system*

With a few modifications for example (1) by adding data mining to the matching process (could be done by installing additional software on the central computation device), (2) extending the database to a data warehouse to store additional data about performed matching processes (data from which reader* at what location? Match to what reference data?) one can use an RFID system* for profiling purposes. The objective of such profiling could be user tracking or generation of decisions for a (hidden) adaption of the environment. Especially in the latter case the resulting combined system shares many characteristics with AmI-systems, when adaption of the environment is implemented.  

As the user in this case is not necessarily aware of being authenticated and does neither control the decision process, nor the adaption of the environment, from his perspective the environment is manipulated by others. Obviously the test of this kind of combined systems (RFID + profiling + adaption) has been prepared for, at least technically and legally (see the case study of the Metro Future Store, chapter ).