Experiences from Near-Field Communication (NFC) in a Meal Service System

In this paper we report the experiences from a pilot test in which users used an NFC-based catering service system. Primarily, the aim of this paper is to present the requirements for improving the functionality of the NFC-based systems. These requirements are based on the experiences from the catering service pilot described in this paper. The NFC-based catering service system was used by logistics service, meal producer, elderly care and elderly clients of the catering service. Meal service clients and drivers of the logistics service used NFC-enabled devices and other parties monitored the service process. The duration of the pilot test was approximately eight weeks. The NFC-based system is investigated from technical, organizational and user aspects in this paper. Overall, the interaction technique itself was intuitive and easy to adopt, but the unreliability of the system incurred problems during the pilot. We also suggest that continuous identification is an appropriate way to implement user/device identification. However, this requires NFC-enabled mobile devices to be user or environment-specific. Based on experiences from the pilot test, we suggest that integrating NFC with other technologies requires keeping the scheme simple and limiting non-controllable factors. Maintenance of tags should be taken into account when an organization is adopting the system. Furthermore, the importance of immediate feedback concerning touching emerged in the pilot test.