Dan Deavours and Karthik Ramakrishnan spend their days shooting radio waves into passive microchips taped to a slab of 2-inch thick Owens Corning foam insulation.

Then they chart how many come back.

“It’s sort of like radar,” said Deavours, as quiet test tones – similar to the buzz patients hear when getting an X-ray – pummeled thin strips of plastic and circuits in his windowless lab. “It blasts it and looks for a return.”

The monotonous process may not sound like much, but the Kansas University scientists’ research is tuning into the next wave of business inventory technology.

Deavours is director of the RFID Alliance Laboratory, which aims to compile unbiased information about the performance, efficiency and other components of product-tracking technology known as “radio frequency identification” tags.

Such tags are considered the next generation of the traditional bar code, which has appeared on countless products for years and allows computer scanners to track everything from the price of a loaf of bread to the contents of a box delivered to a store.

RFID takes such technology to the next level. Each tag, or strip, holds a microchip that can be read by a radio transmitter from a remote location. Scanning a storeroom or warehouse can take mere seconds, compared with other labor-intensive procedures.

Dan Deavours, assistant research professor at Kansas University, is testing radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, pictured in foreground, that are the latest in product inventory management. Deavours and other researchers are testing how well the new technology works.

However, the current technology, Deavours said, has a number of limitations – limitations his lab is busy charting, so that businesses don’t end up buying into systems that won’t perform to expected standards.

For one thing, he said, the tags can’t be read consistently when placed next to metal, whether it’s a barrel of oil, the foil inside a box of laundry detergent – even the metallic paint on the outside of a wireless phone.

“Right now, is RFID better than bar codes? No,” said Deavours, an assistant research professor at KU’s Information and Telecommunication Technology Center. “Will it be better than bar codes? Someday, yeah.”

Companies certainly are betting that the technology will come through. Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, already has told its suppliers to start including tags on boxes of deliveries this year; Target and Best Buy also are embracing RFID.

Deavours and Ramakrishnan, a graduate student from India, are tracking a number of tags – there are about 30 on the market – for performance, security, limitations and other characteristics that could be important as more companies buy into such systems.

• 6News video: KU laboratory works to better track inventory

And while the use of such tags currently is limited to tracking inventories, they already are being envisioned for expanded abilities. One operation already has hired the lab to see how tags might help keep wireless phones from being taken into restricted areas of a production plant.

Deavours figures that it won’t be long before pharmaceuticals companies start tagging individual bottles of drugs, to help track supplies that otherwise might be counterfeited. Computer makers might put strips on each monitor, keyboard or hard drive, to ease tracking of warranty information without having to have a receipt.

Who knows? If the technology’s performance improves and prices drop – each tag currently costs anywhere from 30 cents to $2 – RFID tags on milk bottles could tell a person’s refrigerator when the milk’s expiration date is soon to arrive.

But as Deavours and Ramakrishnan emphasized that such advanced uses remained well into the future.

Their tests have confirmed it.