Sensors that scavenge their power are all the rage

PERCHED AS ITIT is above a harbour on the Dingle peninsula, on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, Mike Fitzgerald’s office has an unparalleled view of the domain he hopes to conquer: the open sea. As founder and boss of Net Feasa, a name derived from the Irish word for knowledge, Mr Fitzgerald’s ambition is to fit a sensor to each of the millions of shipping containers that are moving around the world. By using these to track the locations of, and conditions experienced by, those containers, and transmitting that information back to the people who need to know via satellite when a container is at sea and via a mobile-phone network when it is in port or on land, he believes firms will be able to maximise the efficiency of supply chains.And supply-chain oversight is but one of the benefits small, remotely connected sensors can bring. People already interact with many of them—sometimes knowingly, such as those in smart watches, sometime less so, such as those which regulate temperature and lighting in their offices. Some folk, indeed, talk grandly of the result being an interconnected network akin to an “internet of things” (o).