From the Sensors Expo files, I saw another interesting integration from ams for use with perishable products. It’s an RFID/temperature sensor combination with some smarts. It’s a tag you put on the packaging for a specific product to monitor the temperature history of the product.

In other words, this isn’t about alerting that, “It’s getting hot in here, so… turn up the A/C!” While you can specify high and low triggers, more interestingly, the mini-system has an Arrhenius “calculator” built in. Whoever installs a specific tag for a specific product initializes the activation energy for that product. This means that the tag can literally project the lifetime and declare when the product is too old.

The key here is that there isn’t some pre-determined lifetime; it depends on how much heat the product is exposed to. If the truck carrying the product is driving through the North Dakota winter, then the temperature sensor will accumulate less hot weather, and the product will last longer. A summer drive through Arizona with a dodgy reefer unit, by contrast, will register much faster degradation. The sensor can tell the difference, and there’s no (or less) guesswork involved.

You can find more on their website.