Pablo Averbuj

RFID and Laundry

RFID seems like a useful technology that can be applied in very evil ways. One non-evil application I had thought about was laundry. If each piece of clothing came encoded with laundering instructions, commercial washing systems could be developed where you could just drop a gigantic mountain of laudry in, and it could automatically detect, sort, and handle each piece correctly. Even better if a customer could attach his own rfid tag that would identify the clothing as their own, further reducing the amount of work.

Consumer grade machines could use the tags to a much lesser degree, by identifying clothes that don’t belong in the load. For example, it could detect that 90% of the clothes in this load are light colors but one of them says don’t use bleach, and another says it is a dark item, and refuse to do laundry until the situation is corrected or overridden.