In a significant stride toward more efficient Internet of Things (IoT) implementations, researchers from UC San Diego have introduced low-cost, scalable passive sensors that operate without batteries. Slide over battery-dependent devices because these sensors leverage Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, generally costing mere cents to a few dollars, commodifying the market with a ubiquitous presence in retail for inventory tracking to contactless payment systems, as UC San Diego News reported.
Advancing passive sensing, the UCSD team, led by Nagarjun Bhat, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering and associate professor Dinesh Bharadia, unveiled a new method that skirts the need for power-intensive analog-digital converters. “We wondered whether we could repurpose RFID tags to do battery-free sensing and tracking,” Bhat stated, as per UC San Diego News. This underscores current systems' limitations, such as bulkiness, expense, and complexity, making them hard to scale sustainably. These limitations have thus far hampered efforts to capitalize effectively on real-time data monitoring.
The essence of their approach lies in the innovative use of RFID, a common and inexpensive technology, to sense immediate environmental data, such as temperature and humidity, and convey the information to IoT networks. Bhat's research indicates that their RFIDs can be deployed across various domains, from optimizing agriculture through scalable soil moisture tracking to upgrading athletic training regimes by embedding sensors in shoe soles for performance metrics.
By refocusing on analog sensing, which detects changes in environmental stimuli by converting them into parameters of a wireless signal, the research endeavors to tap into real-time notification capabilities without custom hardware or specialized interfaces. "We took the concept of analog sensing and made it real-time," Bhat further elucidated, an ambition that could transform not only consumer convenience but also envisages more complex and data-centric applications in medicine and agriculture, in this nascent era where AI, as Bharadia told UC San Diego News, is "powered by data enabled by sensors," paving a path for feats once consigned to conventional power-dependent counterparts.
The research, presented at the 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2024) in Hangzhou, China, illustrates a potential paradigm shift in data collection and utilization, symbolizing a leap towards a sustainable, battery-free future for the IoT landscape.
