"I See Dead Assets!"
- By Lachlan Colquhoun
- June 12, 2023
Well before the proliferation of sensors through the Internet of Things (IoT), the world became comfortable with the idea of identification chips in livestock, domestic pets, and tracking assets in the logistics industry.
One little-known application of this technology is gaining new traction in an unlikely place, in cemetery management, where it is used to mark and verify the location of individual graves and create up-to-date digital registries of the "assets."
Stephen Laing is the managing director of U.K. company ASSETtrac, which offers tracking services across several industries but has also been at the forefront of providing tracking technology to cemeteries in the U.K. and Australia.
The solution, called Epitrace, has been adopted by over 120 clients since 1999 to confirm the identity and location of deceased remains, including cremated remains. The goal is facilitating family visits, adjacent spouse burials, and exhumation.
“Tagging graves sounds crazy for something that doesn’t move, but to preserve site owner reputation and ensure families know where their loved ones are actually buried—these are easily understood reasons for doing so,” says Laing.
By modern standards, the solution is relatively low-tech. Epitrace is a peg containing a passive read-only microchip transponder, essentially a larger version of what is injected into pets and livestock for tracking.
“To preserve site owner reputation and ensure families know where their loved ones are actually buried—these are easily understood reasons"
The Epitrace pegs are planted ideally one foot above the head end of the grave under grass or even directly under a flat stone or wooden plaques as long as the position is not on the earth mound. This means any disturbed vandalized memorials can be precisely replaced in the right spot.
As covert markers, the pegs are invisible to potential vandals, reducing the chances of erroneous exhumation or burying the deceased in the wrong place or on top of previous graves.
Each peg has its unique code number, which can be identified by a handheld scanner or a mobile phone, and the data can be aggregated into a map display and stored in the cloud and updated when necessary.
Efficient site management
“Most people haven’t kept their asset registers up to date because it’s been too much like hard work,” says Laing.
"The old way of doing things is to print off an Excel spreadsheet, stick it on a cupboard and then have some junior employee wander around the place ticking off what they can find."
The system promotes efficient site management, marking burial sites and pre-purchased plots.
In the U.K., all known burial ground and crematorium operators have details of their operations published in an extensive online directory.
ASSETtrac publishes and hosts this database, and cemeteries can easily log in and add details and update information. Digital information from Epitrace adds another layer of data and visibility.
Digital tributes
Beyond site management, the solution also offers the potential for new applications as society continues to engage with ideas of ancestry and history.
Laing says he recently visited a crematorium that wanted to adopt the solution with QR codes on the back of war graves.
The idea was that visitors would scan the QR code with their phones and click through to a URL to learn more about the soldier and the conflict they had been involved in.
This could be applied to non-military historic graves and used by the wider public to include on-site tributes to deceased friends and family members.
Funeral practices are also changing rapidly as many cities run out of burial space, leading to a movement for natural burials in bushland. In these environments, markers for graves can become overgrown, so Epitrace can be an identification and marking solution.
Clearly, grave locations are an essential thing to many people. Digital technology should be leveraged, and other solutions can also be paired with digital devices.
New coordinates
Stephen Laing gives another example of a navigation tool provided by the U.K. website what3words, which can potentially give people grave locations.
What3words has given every three-meter square in the world a simple address of three words that can be easily integrated into products, platforms and apps.
There are 57 trillion of these three-meter squares on the planet. Mongolia has adopted the system for its postal service as, historically, the country had no postcodes. For example, writing to the national parliament would be sending an address to "Undulations. Cheer. Androids."
"GPS coordinates are many numbers long, and you can never remember them," says Laing.
“But the three words are very distinctive, and this could be applied to cemeteries for guiding visitors to plots where memorialization or other visual cues are limited, such as in natural burial grounds.”
Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Randomerophotos