If you love it, you should never let it go

Tagging isn’t new; who didn’t have name tags on their clothes and belongings at school? Who doesn’t use luggage tags when travelling abroad, and how many of us now have a reward scheme associated with out house/car keys if lost? Tagging makes inherent sense, to increase the chances of retrieving lost property, but what about as a preventative measure to avoid losses in the first place?

That’s the premise of the latest wave of ‘smart tags’ that are hitting the market, effectively enabled by a creating and maintaining a wireless connection to something that most of us already cherish; our smart phones.

Smart tags that use wireless tethering aren’t new; there are numerous examples of wireless tags already on the market that create a virtual ‘leash’ between a phone and the tag, used predominantly for proximity sensing — if the object wanders too far from the smart device, an alarm sounds.

However, the latest generation of electronic tags take this a step further, by integrating more forms of wireless connectivity, more sensors and greater functionality.

Hypertag

As with most things today, the Cloud will play a key role in making next-gen tags really useful. One example of this comes from Tile, a startup using crowd funding (enabled by the Selfstarter open source framework) that has developed a tag based on Bluetooth Low Energy, which aims to take tethering to a new level.

Tile has been developed with simplicity in mind; they are designed to be used for 12 months without charging or changing a battery (after a year, they’re returned for recycling and customers replace it with a new, up-to-date Tile). More significantly they are intended to operate symbiotically with a smart phone via an application that, arguably, provides the real intelligence.

Essentially, any tag can be located via an smart phone running the app; it means that, even when out of range of the owner’s phone, the tag can still be located as long as it is within range of another phone running the app. The company assures that security is preserved and that any phone used as a ‘stepping stone’ back to the owner remains unaware that a tag is ‘borrowing’ its connectivity.

Obviously, the efficacy of this approach relies less on the number of tags in circulation and more on the number of people running the app on their smart phone, and so the company is promoting the solution as ‘the world’s largest lost and found’. Find out more at www.thetileapp.com.

Makes sense

A key feature of the new tags is their increased ‘intelligence’ and while this may sometimes be more about the associated smart phone app, it will also be achieved through the integration of more sensors.

A good example of this comes in the form of the Wireless Sensor Tag, produced by Cao Gadgets LLC, which integrated a 3D compass, temperature and moisture sensors, along with a Hall effect sensor. According to founder Zhiheng Cao, there are also plans to integrate a humidity sensor.

Rather than using Bluetooth Low Energy operating at 2.4GHz, the Wireless Sensor Tag operates at 433MHz using a proprietary protocol and is driven by a PIC16 microcontroller, and features a replaceable battery that should power the tag for up to 3 years. Also, while there is a smart phone applications for the tag, its gateway is formed by either a dedicated hardware box connected via Ethernet, or a Windows-based PC. This ‘hub’ network approach makes it less suited to out-of-home tagging and more for monitoring your home environment, from the temperature in your fridge to the status of your garage door. As long as you can connect to the internet, you can access the tags remotely. Visit www.wirelesstag.net for more information.

Making your own

The ‘need’ for wireless tags will grow as their applications evolve, but clearly they have a wide scope, perhaps even wider than the often-cited Smart Watches that are just around the corner. The ability to integrate any number of sensors, specifically MEMS-based sensors that offer low size, low power and high reliability, creates a compelling value-proposition for consumers and manufacturers. Couple that with the abundance of connected devices and the relative ease of developing a companion application, then the future for smart tags would indeed seem bright.

One solution that has already been used to bring products to market is the SensorTag development platform from Texas Instruments, based on its CC2541 Bluetooth Low Energy compliant SoC (integrated 8051 MCU and RF front-end). The kit comprises six sensors: an IR temperature sensor (TMP006) from TI; a humidity sensor (SHT21) from Sensirion; a pressure sensor (T5400) from Epcos; an accelerometer (KXTJ9) from Kionix; a gyroscope (IMU-3000) from InvenSense, and a magnetometer (MAG3110) from Freescale.

The wireless SoC at the heart of the kit operates at 2.4GHz and supports Bluetooth Low Energy, but can also support proprietary protocols. However, the current focus is to support iOS devices and, as such, there is a companion app, which can connect to the tag and monitor its various data streams, as well as configure the tag. You can find out more at www.ti.com/sensortag.

While wireless tethering is well established it hasn’t exactly become mainstream, similarly NFC-enabled tags have yet to proliferate. And while the high anticipation that surrounds smart watches may, or may not, result in a new wave of consumer ‘must-haves’, perhaps the smart tag could just steal the limelight. Early examples indicate they could offer almost limitless scope for innovation while riding on the ‘Internet of Things’ trend that is widely regarded as being on the brink of explosive growth.