LEDs and radio waves could help locate items in shops

Researchers from Penn State and Hallym University in South Korea believe that large shopping centres could integrate overhead LED lights with an assigned location code in order to direct shoppers to a desired item.

The idea is that a shopper logs his or her item request on a computer or over a phone at the shop entrance and the location of the item is then revealed on a screen.

Mohsen Kavehrad, director of the Centre for Information and Communications Technology Research at Penn State University, said: ‘The same lights that brighten a room can also provide locational information.’

However, LED-transmitted locational information alone will not work because light does not transmit through walls.

Kavehrad, working with Zhou Zhou, a graduate student in electrical engineering at Penn State University, used a ZigBee wireless transfer network to combat this problem.

ZigBee is designed for small, low-power, digital radio-frequency applications that require the short-range wireless transfer of data at relatively low rates.