RFID chips may be coming to your food!
LONDON, England - June 1, 2011 - Radio Frequency ID (RFID) 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 times.
Someday you may even find them inside your stomach. At least they will be there if Hannes Harms has anything to say about it. Harms, a design engineering student at the Royal College of Art in London, has created 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 tell you the entire supply chain behind everything you are putting into your mouth. While this could be good news for diabetics, people with serious food allergies, and vegans, it also has nonmedical applications.
A properly equipped refrigerator would be able to give the user a look at everything it contains and when each food item 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 nutritional information of whatever you are eating, as well as how many miles it has traveled 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.
