An adoption of halal food recognition system using mobile RFID/NFC technology

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is the type of wireless technology that enables handheld devices to read the low-priced tags at a short distance without requiring a power source. Since Malaysia is a modern Muslim country and heading towards being a global halal-hub; herein consumer retail industry maintaining halal product integrity is a vital factor which requires to introduce a comprehensive and appropriate tracking and tracing technology to maintain halal product integrity and develop a technological framework that can support the entire Halal Product Supply Chain (HPSC). In the meantime, one of the debated issue with in the halal food industry is detecting fake halal products from genuine ones, therefore, in accordance to this problem Malaysian Muslim authority on halal product Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia (JAKIM) introduced and implemented the halal logo as the halal validation on the request of market trading agencies. Also, JAKIM introduced a platform for sending a text message in order to inquire about the halal status of products with “SMS Halal JAKIM” and such that this can be performed by sending SMS or MMS. While this service exposed to be time-consuming and witnessed other internal problems. Thus, this prevailing condition was an indication for a comprehensive study that could address the issues in order to provide complete details about consumer products. Therefore, this research has used near-field wireless technologies i.e. RFID/NFC in order to validate halal status for the food products by developing a database based on products listed in the JAKIM website. This research introduced a system which is suitable for every user through developing an application for identifying and validating halal products through Android smartphones which are capable to read NFC or external RFID readers. Whereas, existing applications made use of barcodes which can be easily copied instead of using barcodes using RFID/NFC tags minimizes the chances of fraud within the halal industry. In addition, this study compared the usability, efficiency, affordability, security, and customer satisfaction between new application and old systems by collecting data from customers who were asked to use the new application while checking the halal status of the product. Therefore, a paired sample test was performed to assess the differences between the new and existing systems. The results indicated a significant difference between the systems and values for each of the construct were found p<0.5, and the mean difference for usability was found 2.022, efficiency 2.446, affordability 1.830, security 1.956, and for satisfaction 2.00. The values for mean differences revealed that the new system is better than the existing ones in terms of usability, efficiency, affordability, security, and customers satisfaction. Also, this system is an addition into existing systems that are based on product identification techniques using RFID/NFC technologies and this system will help consumers to identify halal products with ease while they are shopping in stores.