November 07, 2005

NJ Business: "RFID for Kids: A Better Leash"

Ari Naim tells of an experience that represents every parent's nightmare. "I was in the dinosaur exhibit of the Museum of Natural History with my four-year-old son. I allowed myself to look at one of the exhibits for a few seconds instead of staring at my son all the time, and I turned around, and he was just gone. You can go in two directions and I picked one. He wasn't there. My heart just about stopped. I found him after 10 or 15 minutes hanging out and looking at an exhibit, but I was ready to call the police."

Naim is the founder of Remote Play Inc. on Brunswick Pike, and he devised his first product to forestall that nightmare. Using innovative wireless technology called Sil-verLink, the product is Child Alert, a child monitoring device available now at Babies R Us stores for $ 119.

"We are good at making consumer products," says Naim, who was also the founder of the Sycom Technologies, now called Digital5 and located at Quakerbridge Executive Center. "Child safety was at the top of our list.

Child Alert has an LCD device for the parent that can be set in a range of comfort zones, from 10 feet to 300 feet. The device is smaller than a cell phone; it measures 2 inches by 1.5 inches and is 1/2 inch thick. The child wears an adjustable sensor belt made of nylon webbing. Should the belt be removed, or if the sensor unit pops out, the parent knows it.

"It's not a GPS device," says Naim. "We are not trying to find a child who has been abducted. We are trying to prevent it from happening."

If the child goes out of the boundary set by the parent, the device will alarm or vibrate. If the device alarms, and you see your child and are comfortable with where they are, you can increase the zone.

If the child is not in view, the parent can start an alarm device on the child's belt to help locate him. "A five-year-old kid making a noise will hopefully attract attention," says Naim.

A parent can also look for the child by observing the bars on the device. More bars means you are getting closer.

The device can be adapted so that one parent can monitor up to three children. A device for an additional child costs $49. "All the devices are individually identified, so you can be with a friend who has a device," says Naim. There will be no duplication "unless you have 8 million kids within 300 feet."

"We have an interesting wireless platform that fills the gap that Blue-tooth and WiFI doesn't satisfy," says Naim. "We are able to do very sophisticated ranging with ultra low power using the spread spectrum (many frequencies at the same time). If one frequency gets disturbed we have many other frequencies to get the information across."

Naim partnered with a juvenile equipment distributor, Safety 1st, which he terms "innovative and aggressive" for a multi-year agreement. Child Alert is manufactured in blue and white, the Safety 1st colors, and it is delivered to the wholesaler in Hong Kong. Located in Canton, Massachusetts, Safety 1st makes car seats, wall plug protectors, baby monitors, and other safety equipment. It has an exclusive distribution agreement with Babies R US for Child Alert (which it calls In-Reach) for one year.

The son of an Israeli diplomat, Naim majored in electrical and chemical engineering at Drexel, Class of 1985, and has his doctorate from Drexel, where he did research in information theory and artificial intelligence projects. In 1987 he established his first company, a research firm, Reshet Inc.

In 1993 he established Sycom Technologies to develop and distribute voice recorders and software that could download voice transmission into a computer audio file. Then he moved into translating web pages to recordings for car radios (U.S. 1, May 27, 1998). The name was changed to Digital5, and it now develops "middleware" software to distribute and play audio, video, and photo content among networked consumer electronics devices throughout the connected home (U.S. 1, August 17,2005).

Naim and his wife, a general and bariatric surgeon at Columbia, have two school aged sons. Gideon Naim, Ari's brother, is the chief financial officer. The new firm, Remote Play, has 10 people here plus some in India and some in Hong Kong.

"We started the whole digital voice recorder market, and high tech consumer electronics is the sandbox where I play," says Naim. He focuses on portable products, usually leading edge consumer products, which can be produced at high volume for low cost. The products are designed in Lawrenceville but, as at Digital5, some of the software is programmed in India.

"Our next product will be Tag Alert," says Naim. "We shrank the RFID tag to 1 inch by 1.5 inches and .27 mm thick. You can stick it on your cell phone, and your phone will beep you if you leave it behind." The price point will be $29 to $59.

The tag works on a 2016 coin battery which runs for almost a year and stays on all the time. The amount of radiation it creates per year, says Naim, is equivalent to a 10-minute phone call.

Using RFID to find personal items is an interesting category to watch, says Naim. "In three years it will be cost $ 19, with additional tags for $7, and I think you'll see everything tagged."

But items like this are difficult to execute in the consumer world, which has so many variables and so many different users. "And radio frequency is affected by many factors in the environment. We had people using this for months."

A third possible product category protects in a different way. It sends an alarm if a person goes too close to something. The alarm can sound at the site of the object being threatened or at another location. Naim compares RFID products of today to where the voice recorder was in the early 1990s. "Once you have the piece out there and people start playing with it, then it starts mushrooming. Then people start chasing me, and hopefully they are 12 months behind me."