Smart Pallets: Toward Self-Powered Pallet-Level Environmental Sensors for Food Supply Chains

This work highlights the need for a low-cost and low-overhead solution to monitor pallet-level environment in the food supply chain to create traceability, accountability and reduce wastage. We identify post-harvest sensing through the supply chain as a key need to reduce food waste. Toward this end, we develop initial prototypes of two different wireless environmental sensing architectures. The first leverages an ultra-low power timer with a current consumption of 35 nA to power gate and periodically wake up the system. The second mode explores a sparse event driven sensing model leveraging the threshold detection features of low power sensors to log events of interest. We demonstrate a millimeter scale prototypes that can read and backscatter temperature and humidity data with as little as 3.2 μW of power.