As radio frequency identification technologies gain acceptance worldwide, many companies are realizing they want to go beyond just identifying an object or location—they want to know about conditions.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) would like to put low-cost sensors on space vehicles to monitor structural and environmental health. For new vehicles, the benefit would be an ...

“We wondered whether we could repurpose RFID tags to do battery-free sensing and tracking,” says Nagarjun Bhat, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering and lead author of a new study. Data is power.