Identification of aquatic organisms using a magneto-optical element

In recent advanced information society, it is important to individually identify products or living organisms automatically and quickly. However, with the current identifying technology such as RFID tag or biometrics, it is difficult to apply to amphibians such as frogs or newts because of its size, stability, weakness under a wet environment and so on. Thus, this research aims to establish a system that can trace small amphibians easily even in a wet environment and keep stable sensing for a long time. The magnetism was employed for identification because it was less influenced by water for a long time. Here, a novel magnetization-free micro-magnetic tag is proposed and fabricated with low cost for installation to a living target sensed by Magneto-Optical sensor for high throughput sensing. The sensing ability of the proposed method, which was evaluated by image analysis, indicated that it was less than half of the target value (1 mm) both in the water and air. The FEM analysis showed that it is approximately twice the actual identification ability under ideal conditions, which suggests that the actual sensing ability can be extended by further improvement of the sensing system. The developed magnetization-free micro-magnetic tag can contribute to keep up the increasing demand to identify a number of samples under a wet environment especially with the development of gene technology.