OPTOELECT
Barcode scanners

KATHY KINCADE

aren’t just for

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

groceries anymore
Barcode scanning—also known
as “automated identification
and data capture”—has moved
way beyond its retail and
manufacturing roots.

This technology began revolutionizing

Barcode scanners have become so ubiquitous in our day-to-day lives that most of us hardly notice them anymore, let alone ponder what makes them tick.

HAND HELD PRODUCTS

the retail market in 1974, when a checker at a supermarket _{FIGURE 1. Two-dimensional scanners rely on CMOS or CCD} in Troy, OH, slid a pack of gum imprinted with a simple sensors to collect 1-D and 2-D barcode data and provide linear barcode over a fixed scanner to ring up the price. proof of delivery.

Thirty years later barcodes are scanned about five billion times a day, and are used as much for tracking packages “Our industry started with the invention of the first by the likes of FedEx and UPS as they are for ringing up barcode label printer and the first scanner that could purchases at WalMart or Home Depot.¹ Other iterations differentiate between dark and light and different widths of the codes can be found on airline and concert tickets, of bars and encoding of information,” Hall said. “Our drivers’ licenses, library books, hospital wristbands . . . the culture has had labels for a century or two, and we have list of products bearing these black-and-white symbols is always shipped things, but now it has come down to the nearly endless, and still growing. ability to print a label on command that is self-adhesive

But barcodes are not just consumer-based point-of-service and contains both human-readable and machine-read-tools; they actually have their roots in manufacturing and able information.” distribution. According to Doug Hall, director of product In fact, barcodes are being used in many industries marketing at Intermec (Everett, WA), barcode scanners outside retail and manufacturing, particularly for emerged 35 years ago on the factory floor for ensuring the quality-control and security applications. In an effort to accuracy of inventory. Today these symbols are a standard improve patient care, for example, hospitals are invest-part of virtually every product or package in a warehouse or ing in barcode scanners to lower the risk of medication on a loading dock, ensuring that the correct item is delivered errors, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration now to the correct location in a timely manner. requires drug makers and blood suppliers to include