This week’s Smart Living roundup features a rechargeable item tracking device, a battery-free chip, and cars that adjust to your personal preferences.

 .

Tintag

A great day can easily turn sour when you can’t find the keys to your car or house, just as you’re headed out the door. The advent of the Internet of Things has delivered trackers for a range of items, and even kids and pets. But the problem with these trackers is that if you forget to replace their batteries, the tracker is rendered useless.

Tintag Electronics is taking trackers to the next level with the launch of Tintag, the market’s first rechargeable item tracker, on Indiegogo Inc. Already Tintag has raised close to its $50K funding goal, with 45 days still left in its campaign.

What makes Tintag unique from other item trackers is that you don’t need to change its battery or ship it back to the manufacturer to have the battery replaced, as it comes with a Home Base wireless charger. Six hours of charging will power the device for about 4 months.

Tintag is waterproof, has an LED and buzzer notifications for finding items, features a Bluetooth antenna with a 100 m range, can be used to find your phone, and the mobile app helps you find Tintags. One Tintag can be connected to multiple phones so all members of your family can keep tabs of the same tracker, at the same time. Also, if ever an item, pet or kid gets lost, the Tintag community can help you find it. The finder simply inputs the unique Tintag ID at found.tint.ag and the owner will immediately receive a notification. Since the Home Base wireless charger will only be used about three to four times per year, the people behind Tintag decided to make it more useful by adding hot spot functionality for monitoring all the Tintags.

Battery-free chips

The primary goal of the Internet of Things movement is to connect everything with every other thing through the web, but this will be a costly task to accomplish unless an affordable chip comes along. It looks like that chip has arrived.

Stanford assistant professor of electrical engineering Amin Arbabian leads a team that’s created an ant-sized chip unlike any other – it is not powered by any type of batteries.

The battery-free chip is an all-in-one chip with its antennae 1/10 the size of a typical WiFi antenna, able to send and receive signals. It has an onboard antenna that can translate and perform incoming instructions. For its power source, it gets energy from the signal it transmits and receives.

Though this type of chip may have a limited range, Arbabian believes that it is not a drawback as the chips can be strategically placed in homes or buildings to create a network, like a neuron.

Arbabian has worked with STMicroelectronics, Inc. to produce 100 of these battery-free chips as a proof-of-concept. One chip only costs a few cents to make, which can significantly lower the cost of connecting more things to the Internet.

Jaguars will soon be able to recognize you

Jaguar Land Rover Automotive PLC is knee-deep in its Smart Assistant project, the car-maker’s answer to the hopeful sector for smart, connected automobiles.

At present, car ownership in Europe has significantly dropped. In London, car ownership has dropped 8 percent, while Paris has seen a 9 percent drop, with a more noticeable decline in Munich of 16 percent. One reason behind this drop is that more consumers are choosing to spend their money on productivity-enhancing technology rather than a new car. To boost new car sales, Jaguar and Land Rover are making their automobiles smarter with the Smart Assistant, and the company plans to roll out this new feature in the next 24 months.

The Smart Assistant will use cameras to recognize the driver’s face, connecting the driver’s smartphone to adapt to the outside climate and adjust settings based on the person’s preferences. Like other connected dashboards, Smart Assistant aims to keep drivers focused on the road but still have mobile access without the use of their hands.