RFID for Battery-less Home Electronics and Tracking Batteries

A Taiwanese company is developing one remote control to end all remote controls.

The home-electronic device will be RFID powered and run without a battery, putting an end to the days of five or six battery-operated remotes for the DVD players, CD players and video recorders of a single entertainment system.

If successfully launched to market, the company says the device could cut down significantly on the number of batteries used in typical home-entertainment systems, thus helping the environment.

Separately, a Canadian company is using RFID to track battery inventories and make sure batteries, which are harmful for the environment, are disposed of properly. The batteries used in the telecommunications industry are depleted at different times, and the company wanted to find a way to check and track battery status easily.

In answer to this problem, the company built an RFID-based system that uniquely identifies batteries, keeping a record of which batteries have been recycled, when and where.

To ensure efficiency, new batteries are also tagged before storing them in the warehouse to make sure they do not stay there too long and slowly lose their power.