Food Safety Detection by Consumers

Clever use of RFID tags to detect and evaluate contaminants

Putting Food-Safety Detection in the Hands of Consumers 
MIT Media Lab
By Rob Matheson MIT Lab News

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory researchers have developed a wireless system that uses inexpensive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags attached to countless products to sense potential food contamination. Comprising the RFIQ system is a reader that detects minute changes in wireless signals emitted from the tags when they interact with food. Certain shifts in RFID tag emissions correspond to levels of certain contaminants within a product; when a wireless prompt from the reader powers up tags, the electromagnetic waves they discharge penetrate the container and are distorted by the content's molecules and ions. The researchers fed these correlations into a machine learning model which, given a new material, can predict both the presence and concentration of contaminants. In experiments, RFIQ detected baby formula laced with melamine with 96% accuracy, and alcohol diluted with methanol with 97%. The research was presented at ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks ... "