Making your home smart could become cheaper and easier, thanks to researchers from the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.
The research team has developed battery-free sensors that are powered by a home’s existing WiFi networks. His new communication mechanism, called WiTAG, will enable the use of regular WiFi devices for reading data from smart devices, unlike existing products that use power-hungry WiFi transmitters to send their data and therefore require the use of batteries.
“If you look at the current sensor products, they need batteries, which nobody likes to have to change, but they will work with commodity WiFi,” explained Omid Abari, an Assistant Professor in Waterloo’s David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. “There has been recent research which proposes approaches that don’t need batteries. But while they’re addressing the battery problem, they’re adding another issue; it doesn’t work with commodity WiFi devices.”
“So, our approach combines the best of these two worlds – it is battery-free, and it works with commodity WiFi devices.”
WiTAG uses radio frequency signals as a power source and makes use of existing WiFi infrastructures to read data from sensors without requiring the sensors to be connected to the WiFi network which makes them much easier to deploy. This allows smart home technologies such as temperature sensors, light sensors and potentially wearable devices, such as, Fitbits and those that monitor heart rate and glucose levels to use the WiTAG system.
The researchers have filed a provisional patent, implemented WiTAG and created the first prototype, and are now working on a second prototype. They are also developing an app that will work with the system and have plans to support a wide variety of applications.
A paper describing the system, titled WiTAG: Rethinking Backscatter Communication for WiFi Networks, which was co-authored by Abari, Tim Brecht, Ali Abedi and Mohammad Hossein Mazaheri appeared in the Proceedings of the 17th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks.