A group of students of Marian Engineering College, Kazhakuttom, has come out with an innovative technology to make shopping more hassle-free in malls, particularly those thronged by customers the most. The students with their skills in applied electronics and instrumentation, have developed a prototype of a trolley which could generate bills of products purchased from a shopping mall.
Explaining the concept, Shijin Shaji, one of the students in the group, said when a customer collects a product from the mall and puts it into the trolley, the code printed in the Radio Frequency Identification Sensor (RFID) tag struck to the product is automatically read by the RFID reader installed in the trolley.
The RFID code is then checked with the database system for the corresponding product. Then the product is added to the bill for the customer. With each drop of the product into the trolley the reader reads the RFID code from the product to the bill for the customer, he said.
Once the RFID records the code, the Liquid Crystal Display screen fixed on the trolley displays the price and quantity of each product. The customer has the option of keeping back the product and the system would deduct the product from the bill. After purchasing, the customer can give a final enter command to the billing system, the final bill along with the cost is printed. The customer can use his smart card to pay for the product by swiping it through the smart card reader installed within the billing system, said Rahul Raj, another team member.
