Washington University connects to new spin-out

Research at Washington University – located in Seattle and not to be confused with Washington University in St Louis – could lead to the long hailed internet of things becoming a reality. Dubbed wifi backscatter, the patent-pending technology is able to connect battery-free devices to a wireless network and draw power from it.

The research group has been supported by the university’s Commercialisation Gap Fund, Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship, Washington Research Foundation, US National Science Foundation and Washington University.

The technology is able to use radio frequency signals as a power source, and has been developed at the university which is now planning to license it to a spin-out. A name for the new company has not been announced yet, nor has a timeline for the commercialisation effort.

The technology solves the current problem of powering sensors embedded into products cheaply and efficiently. The underlying research is being published at the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communication, running from August 17 to August 22, 2014 in Chicago.

Shyam Gollakota, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the university, said: “If internet of things devices are going to take off, we must provide connectivity to the potentially billions of battery-free devices that will be embedded in everyday objects. We now have the ability to enable wifi connectivity for devices while consuming orders of magnitude less power than what wifi typically requires.”