Santa’s little helpers adopt NFC technology 18. December 2015

Children visiting Santa’s Grotto in Blarney Woollen Mills, Ireland, are being given NFC wristbands that are pre-encoded with information provided by their parents. As a child approaches the grotto, the wristband gets scanned by an elf and Santa’s “naughty or nice” book is automatically updated with the information so that he can talk to the children on a personal level.

The solution has been installed by technology company Aptriva in partnership with bespoke NFC tag supplier and manufacturer RapidNFC. NXP’s MIFARE Ultralight® EV1 contactless chips make the magic in the wristbands possible.

“Essentially what they’ve done is created an NFC-based software solution so when parents sign up online to take their children to the grotto, they also include quite personal information that nobody else would know, such as favourite teachers, favourite bands, favourite football teams, things like that,” RapidNFC’s Jack Sage explained to NFC World.

Read more on NFC World.