UC San Diego Researchers Develop Award-Winning Real-Time, Battery-Free Sensors

What if the same RFID “smart barcode” tags used to track packages and retail inventory could also detect changes in the real world—like temperature, pressure or weight—without batteries or added hardware?

That idea's now a reality, thanks to a team of researchers out of UC San Diego's Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) and Qualcomm Institute who have developed a robust and realtime RFID-based passive sensing system, i.e. a technique that can measure naturally occurring phenomena using harvested radio frequency (RF) energy. Ishan Bansal, a second-year master's student in computer engineering, and Dinesh Bharadia, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering, are spearheading the charge with a new paper.

Named SenSync, the software-based innovation recently earned the Best Paper Award at the 2025 IEEE RFID Conference, a top RFID-centric event for academics and industry alike. A travel grant from the National Science Foundation funded the team's attendance at the conference.