- Batteryless sensors are becoming a more common feature of supply chains
- Energous says that its selling point is enabling the delivery of ambient IoT data to the cloud
- The company said it will also deliver a batteryless sensor that can operate as a control unit
Ambient IoT has grown as the management of supply chains has become ever more important over the last couple of years. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) term refers to energy-harvesting sensors that are powered by small amounts of energy from their environment — usually light, radio frequencies and electro-magnetic fields.
Giampaolo Marino, senior vice president of strategy and business development at Energous told Fierce Network that the public company is delivering systems that apply ambient IoT technology to manage supply chains for manufacturers and various applications in the retail, transportation and logistics industries.
The company provides PowerBridge transmitter systems for wireless power network (WPN) systems that connect to batteryless gadgets like tags and sensors. Marino explained that Energous is different from rivals like Wiliot because it can push data from ambient IoT sensors to the cloud.
Ambient to the cloud
“Pushing data to the cloud requires a higher amount of energy,” Marino said. “Energous basically provides enough RF power that is sufficient for ambient IoT nodes to be able push data to the cloud,” he said. This will be microwatts to milliwatts, he said.
Marino said that Energous has just introduced its e-Sense tag, a battery-free, wireless sensor, that can deliver a connection of up to 5 meters to its WPN transmitters. Marino noted that the sensor is a bit more expensive and delivers slightly less range than Wiliot's 10-15 meter range.
“Often times customers are in need of a control unit,” Marino said, laying out the reason for the Energous tag. “They want to have a control unit on a pallet to make sure that the temperature or humidity ... is within the operating range they’re expecting.” So, the control unit may not even be the only ambient IoT sensor that communicates with the other ambient nodes, but it would feed more data back to the company.
Of course — as Marino points out — an ambient IoT sensor could save a lot of money over time, compared to powered Bluetooth LE sensors. The SVP points out that there are around 150 million of these Bluetooth sensors being deployed every year, and they will all need people to go out and replace the batteries in them over time.
“We are expecting the demand for [baterryless sensors] to really grow over the next couple of years and we’re really excited,” Marino said.
Ambient IoT players
Market Research Intellect says that ambient IoT is projected to grow in Europe from a market value of $1.2 billion in 2024 at a 15.2 % compound annual growth rate, attaining a value of $3.5 billion by 2031. The market research firm said that countries like Germany, the U.K., France and Italy are at the forefront of the market, supported by strong manufacturing bases, research and development infrastructure and innovation-driven policies.
As well as major players like Intel and Qualcomm, startups like Atmosic, Vision Group and Wiliot are heavily involved in this field.
Energous, a publicly traded company, said it expects to report over $900,000 in second quarter revenues and record the lowest quarterly net loss of the last 10 years.