Simple hack turns RFID tag into battery-free Internet of Things device

While smart devices are proliferating in the industrial and domestic environments, concerns remain that they will not be sustainable unless their need for batteries and/or charging is removed. Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, are claiming a major advance in this area through making simple modifications to a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag, a battery-free device used to make objects machine-readable for the location and identification, and which are increasingly ubiquitous in common objects.

RFID tags consist of printed metal antennas in squiggly shapes that are connected to a tiny chip. At a recent conference in New Delhi, Omid Abari, Ju Wang and Prof Srinrivasan Keshav from Waterloo’s Cheriton School of Computer Science explained how they gave the tag the ability to sense this environment.

"It's really easy to do," said Wang. "First, you remove the plastic cover from the RFID tag, then cut out a small section of the tag's antenna with scissors, then attach a sensor across the cut bits of the antenna to complete the circuit."