Scientists Push to Place RFID Tracking Chips in Food
Katie Gatto
Physorg
June 4, 2011
RFID, short for Radio Frequency ID, tags have found their way into a wide variety of applications. These pellets, which are often roughly the same size as a grain of rice, can help us to be reunited with our lost pets, keep towels inside the hotel, and keep big box stores shipping the right boxes to the right places at the right time.
In time you may even find them inside your own stomach. At least they will be there if Hannes Harms has anything to say about it. Mr. Harms, who is currently a design engineering student at the Royal College of Art in London, has designed the NutriSmart system. The system is based on edible RFID tags that will tell you more about your food then you ever wanted to know.
The system would be able to not only give you complete nutritional data on the food that you are about to consume, but able to tell you the entire supply chain behind everything that you are putting into your mouth. While this could be good news for diabetics, people with serious food allergies, and vegans, it also has applications outside of the medical.
A properly equipped refrigerator would be able to give the user a look at everything that the box contains, and when it is going to go bad.
The system can also be paired with a “Smart plate”, which would allow the embedded reader in the dish to tell you about the caloric and nutrition information about what you are eating, as well as how many miles it has come to be on your plate. The data can then be sent to your cell phone, via a Bluetooth connection.
No word yet about what happens to the tags when you are finished with them.
