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Internet of Things: Nearable Stickers that Track the Environment of Things
Increasingly the idea of wearable technology is being investigated by tech businesses — Google glass and the Apple Watch are two well-known examples.
Similar to the concept of wearables, one company, Estimote has pioneered the use of small tracking devices that can be attached to objects of any kind. It’s a tracking technology that they’re calling ‘nearables‘. It’s a kind of technology that falls into the category of Near-Field Communication (NFC).
The Estimote nearable devicesare stickers that come with sensors and transmitters to broadcast data via Bluetooth Smart protocol. It’s possible to track things like location, temperature and information about the surrounding area of the device. The company says that you “simply attach a sticker to an item to turn it into a nearable — a smart, connected object that broadcasts data about its location, motion and temperature.”
Inside the tiny Estimote stickers are a microcontroller with memory and radio and an accelerometer and gyroscope, powered by a Lithium ion battery. They’re too expensive to use for tracking expendable things like food, but they offer a cheap way to track high-value objects.
Benjamin Males, chief technology officer and co-founder of Studio XO, said that “it is all well and good having smart spaces and cloud computers but we are thinking about how devices can connect and do more in places and spaces. What we don’t really know is how it will manifest itself — what does it mean to have a connected wardrobe, what would you want it to do if you walked into the supermarket?… We talk about how technology started in workshops, then went to computers, hands, wrists, and the next is the body. There will be more of this.”
