Uses of NFC Technology

May be this is an era of NFC, which has incited me to pen down similar sort of insights subsequently. NFC is a short-range wireless connectivity technology standard that is exclusively designed for providing a safe interaction between electronic devices. NFC based applications usually involves contactless transactions like transit ticketing, payment, access online digital content, and simple and fast data transfers that include calendar synchronization or electronic business cards.

This near field communication technology emerged from a grouping of contactless identification and interconnection technologies. The technology merges the functionalities of peer-to-peer communication, contactless card and contactless reader. Near Field Communication is wholly a standard based short range wireless connectivity technology which enables a simple, intuitive and safe two way communication between electronic devices, thereby allowing customers to perform contactless transactions and access digital content with a single touch. Let us discuss in brief some of the significant uses of NFC technology.

1. Health Care and NFC

It might be quite awkward to guess the correlation between health care and NFC. How could this NFC technology be beneficial towards someone’s health? Here’s how! NFC tags are capable of providing medical professionals with information about what treatments a patient should receive. They can also keep track of details when doctors and nurses have checked in with a particular patient. Last year, the winner of NFC forum was a program conducted to help patients who live in low resource areas and perform the pneumonia study of young children in Pakistan. Each time the child visits the health care organization, the tag is scanned. These tags also collects the clinical and laboratory data associated with any patient and stores the details in a secure server in real time.

NFC tags are pretty best in reading and maintaining health care data more accurately, efficiently and safer for patients in all possible ways. Thanks to this first rate technology, medical professionals are able to use their NFC phones to access secure areas and scan patient tags, so that they can make sure that each patient is receiving appropriate medicine and care, and also receive alerts on when to check that patient again. The impact of NFC in health industry clearly illustrates that these devices occupy a vital position in saving a plenty of lives and improve the quality of living.

2. Contactless Card Pay

Want to transfer your smartphone both as an ATM machine and credit device at the same time? An NFC enabled device will do that for you. Rather than swiping your card or counting cash, it is just enough to wave your phone at a payment desk enabling an NFC reader/device. Once the transaction has been done, you will be receiving a mail instead of a paper receipt. Such kind of payment services are expected to emerge into massive trend in the coming days. Google expects that by 2014, NFC smartphones are likely to account nearly 50 percent of the smartphone marketplace and thereby benefit its Google Wallet app.

This app is something which allows you to wave your phone at a well equipped register to pay all sorts of goods and services. NFC lives within a short range of about 1.5 inches, which makes it a perfect choice for secure transactions like contactless credit card payments. Both MasterCard and Visa are the members of the NFC forum and are involved in programs that use NFC enabled devices as a flash payment option.

3. Easy Usability & Transportation

When NFC enabled phones start to prevail all over, it becomes easy to merge two devices by simply touching the phones together. Link a headset or print an image by simply touching your device to a printer. The user can simply tap a photo of the person he wants to call. This is accomplished by the embedded NFC tag in the photo which automatically transmits the appropriate number to the phone. Coming to transportation, NFC works with almost all contactless readers and smartcards, which means it can be easily integrated into the public transit payment systems which also use a smart card swipe.

4. Social Media

While each and every new technology emerging these days has got a social media ingredient, why don’t NFC too touch a little of it? Servtag a German based company came up with an absolute social media solution for NFC enabled phones called Friend ticker. This was the first move made on NFC enabled devices in the social media journal. More than 250 NFC tag stickers were applied by the company at various locations in Berlin, so that users can swipe their phones and alert their friends that they had checked in at that location. Next to Friend ticker, Foursquare came up with a legitimate solution for location based networking. A plenty of social media applications for NFC were followed there with. Friend Connector is an app that allows people who meet in a physical space to exchange their profile data via their NFC enabled mobile phones.

With the Use of NFC, you should also be interested to know how to use NFC effectively, hence there round ups over the internet about the security slickness.

Bottom Line

Near Field Communication transactions are rising day by day and some experts at Juniper research have concluded that NFC transactions will hit around $50 billion by 2014. With an NFC enabled device, there are a lot you could do. In short, NFC can be effectually serving three master purposes –sharing, pairing and transactions. Hence, start counting your days of using credit cards and debit cards. They will be of no use in the coming days with the booming NFC technology.