LONDON — A real-time patient tracking and referral system for use in developing countries won the commercial track in the NFC Forum-organized global competition at the summit. The system, developed by Interactive Research and Development of Pakistan, is currently being used for a pneumonia surveillance study for young children in Karachi, Pakistan.

And a service that uses NFC-enabled mobile phones to form social networks, under development at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, gained top prize for the most innovative NFC research project of the year.

The winners were selected from 10 finalists in each category, which had been whittled down from 52 entries from 21 countries and four continents. The competition sponsors included Nokia, Inside Contactless, Stollmann E+V GmbH, as well as the congress organizers WIMA. Equipment sponsors were Over-C and ViVOtech.

"There were some amazing proposals on view and the competition was a real eye-opener, even for me who lives in a country, Japan, that has 50 million mobile phones out in the market and 7 million laptops equipped with NFC," Koichi Tagawa, chairman of the NFC Forum and general manager of Sony's FeliCa NFC and smartcard business, said at the awards ceremony. "This year's submissions prove that the true power of a technology can best be measured by its success in enabling new innovations," said Tagawa.

The shortlisted applications included NFC solutions for everything from location-based social networking to language learning, and from secure airline travel services to online banking authentication."

Commercial entries were evaluated on market viability and how successfully and innovatively they meet the identified need using NFC technology. Research entries were judged on quality of design and their creative and innovative use of technology. Tagawa noted that last year's winner in the commercial track, Norwegian group VingCard Elsafe, had already installed over 100,000 units of its winning technology, a system that allows hotel guests with NFC-enabled mobile handsets to bypass check-in processes and unlock their guest rooms directly on arrival.

Shana Mohammed, director of the community outreach program at Interactive Research and Development (see photo), said the project has the potential to help fight diseases in developing countries, as she accepted the prize. This was almost prescient as within days an outbreak of Swine Flu exposed the need to carefully monitor and control patients with particular forms of contagious illness.

Shana Mohammed receives the first prize from Koichi Tagawa, chairman of the NFC Forum.

Nokia provided the phones for the current phase of the project, which was developed in conjunction with the MIT Media Labs and Johns Hopkins University in the United States. The MIT team produced an initial design and working prototype, from which the IRD team then developed the final product.

Participants in trials of the system, mainly children, were fitted with an NFC tag containing their identity number and it could then be used to feed back information on statistics of diseases. Importantly, the NFC bracelets also allow accurate tracking of blood and other samples so that the right person could be treated for the right disease.

At each encounter, the Nokia 6131 phone is used to scan the child's tag. Pertinent immunization, clinical and laboratory data is collected and posted to the server via the country's GPRS network.

Placed second in the commercial track was Servtag of Germany, for an NFC-based mobile social ticker that allows users to share their actual locations with friends by touching NFC stickers in restaurants and bars. Third place went to Nordea of Finland for its end-user authentication solution for online banking, which enables secure access to an online banking site via an NFC-enabled handset and a dual-interface bank card.

In the research track, the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), Faculty of Electrical Engineering took second place for its Touch to Communicate project, which allows people with difficulty communicating to manage phone calls with a simple touch between a mobile device and passive electronic tags.

Third-place went to ETH Zurich of Switzerland for a mobile application that supports consumer purchasing decisions by interacting with tagged products to deliver point-of-sale product ratings.

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