Meta-Sticker: Sub-Terahertz Metamaterial Stickers for Non-Invasive Mobile Food Sensing

Subhajit Karmakar, Atsutse Kludze, Yasaman Ghasempour

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Food waste is one of the greatest economic and ethical challenges in the world. Empowering consumers with the ability to assess the quality of fruit can be a game changer for reducing waste and motivating a healthier diet. In this paper, we present Meta-Sticker a novel low-cost non-invasive solution for accurate fruit sensing via a sub-THz metamaterial sticker. The key idea is to exploit fruit as a substrate for resonating meta-atoms. Changes in the chemical composite of the fruit over time (e.g., sugar and water concentration) yield variation in the dielectric properties of the fruit (here substrate). Interestingly, this would affect the resonant frequency of the Meta-Sticker. We design Meta-Sticker to resonate in the sub-THz bands for their sensitivity to water, mm-scale penetration depth, and non-ionizing features that offer high-resolution inferences from the inner pulp of the fruit. We develop a model that translates the resonance of Meta-Sticker to well-known ripeness metrics, namely Dry Matter and Brix. We fabricate Meta-Sticker on paper and conduct extensive over-the-air experiments. We demonstrate that our system can estimate Brix and Dry Matter in three different types of fruits with an average Normalized RMSE value of 1.24%, an error that yields a negligible impact on taste and is imperceptible by the consumer. Our design is non-invasive, low-cost (less than a cent), passive, biodegradable, and conformal.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSenSys 2023 - Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensors Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages335-348
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9798400704147
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 12 2023
Event21st ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensors Systems, SenSys 2023 - Istanbul, Turkey
Duration: Nov 13 2023Nov 15 2023

Publication series

NameSenSys 2023 - Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensors Systems

Conference

Conference21st ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensors Systems, SenSys 2023
Country/TerritoryTurkey
CityIstanbul
Period11/13/2311/15/23

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Control and Systems Engineering

Keywords

  • 6G
  • food sensing
  • metamaterials
  • sub-terahertz

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