Integrating Actuation on RFID Tags: an Energy Consideration

The Internet serves primarily as a medium for communication and collaboration between people, using data that is generated by people. The increased deployment of RFID integrated with infrastructure as the EPC network in the supply chain indicates that the Internet is moving from a human-generated data network to an Internet of Things, where things as well as people generate and share data. We believe that - besides sensing technologies - there is high value for tagged objects to provide direct feedback to users and to trigger physical changes and actions in the real world. We give three motivating applications in which valuable feedback can be provided back to the environment by the things themselves. Since power is scarce on RFID tags, it is crucial to investigate the power requirements of different microactuators and select actuation principles based on their power consumption.

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