Our service can be designed for:
– authorizing or not the access to specified areas under control (Access Control)
– registering, in a certain location, transits of all attendants, by also taking note of date, time, and versus (i.e. if they were entering or exiting) every time they enter that area (Access Monitoring)

Access control & monitoring technologies currently utilized :
————————————————————-
At present the two most utilized technologies are:
Barcode reading
Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID)
The choice of either one of subject technologies depend on several factors, e.g.:
Attendants number and flow rate
Number of areas under control
budget constraints
etc.
Regardless of the utilized technology, the participant is usually provided with a badge, which must be carried of visible manner during all his presence in the meeting area.
It is usually personalized by means of a bar code which, whenever scanned by means of specific readers, supply the organizers/security with all the necessary information.
A very sophisticated variation of the badge (called “TAG” or “transponder”) uses a microscopic and invisible circuit allowing its passive and fully automatic reading (“hands free “or RFID proximity technology) and at high speed.

The above technologies are described below.

Automatic proximity reading (RFID)
————————————————————-
It’s, up to now, the most advanced technology that can be utilized in this kind of applications.
It consists of supplying each participant with a special badge, called « TAG » that is usually identical to credit card sized badges (86 x 54 mm. with a thickness of 0,76 mm.), in the case of “passive” , i.e. battery less, TAG’s.
These are the ones generally utilized by IDS.

Such a TAG’s can be printed in every colors, with photos, logos, images, scripts and barcodes.
They can therefore also be ideally utilized as membership cards.

The presence of a barcode printed on its front enables such a TAG’s to be utilized both in radio-frequency and in a barcodes environment, with obvious advantages.

In its basic utilization, the TAG is automatically detected whenever somebody wearing it (even if kept in a wallet, a lady’s purse, in an attaché case, etc.) walks through a “gate”.

If, on the contrary, somebody walks through the gate without a TAG, or with a not valid TAG, visible and/or acoustic warnings can be emitted (in case of Access Control services).

In the case of a valid TAG, IDS access control applications enable to know, in real time:
who has walked though the various gates (usually linked in a network)
when (date and time)
direction (i.e. whether the participant entered or went out)

The above features permit also to know at each time not only how many, but also who is inside a certain given area, with precious consequences for the civil protection, in the case (God forbids) of a catastrophic natural event or a terrorist attack.

Moreover, whenever security is very important, IDS technologies associate to each participant’s ID his picture, whether obtained by reliable sources (the so-called « security certification » of the images) or shot at the entrance, in real time.

In this way, as soon as anybody walks (at any pace) through IDS gates, his recorded picture pops up on the security’s monitor, enabling an accurate and immediate comparison.

This is important in the unlikely event of somebody being kidnapped, without knowledge of the security, and his TAG uplifted by terrorists.

Many other features are obtainable whenever using this technology. For instance, by adding into our software a little “text to speech” application, there will be an automatic salutation voice message personalized with the name (or other data) of the transiting visitor. Moreover, his name, or other data, can appear on a screen located after the control gate

Barcodes
————————————————————–
Barcode readers (usually referred to as « scanners ») usually employed by IDS utilize laser technology which enables an operator to read, without any errors, a barcode at a distance of 10-15 cm and without any physical contact, nor the need to remove a badge (where the barcode is usually printed) from its holder, as it happened in the early times.
IDS scanners are usually of the « batch » type, i.e. they memorize all the scanned data before downloading it into a PC server.

In other occasions, e.g. whenever you want to have a mapping of the audience, the readers that are utilized transmit in radiofrequency each and every scanned data into a server in real time.

With the barcode technology, regardless of the scanners used, there are

anyhow some important limits, like :
The need of specialized staff for badges scanning
A physical stop-over of the Participants (not always welcomed)
The building up of possible queues, in the case of big audience and/or of people arriving simultaneously (the average scanning time is 5 sec., i.e., relatively long)