End of paper labels: Emerging smart labels toward Internet of Things

The authors pay attention to the labels all around us. Paper or plastic labels are widely used offline and depend on manual operation. Recently, smart labels equipped for wireless communication and e-paper displays are emerging. Smart labels can show online information using the Internet or other networks. By featuring smart labels, dummy objects (products, articles, or items) are transformed into smart objects that can intelligently display what humans need from them. In this paper, we propose a smart label platform for a variety of smart labels. This platform implements an association concept between smart labels and related objects using assign, un-assign, delete, and update operations. Its open interface enables integration of smart labels with the Internet or other networked systems across the industry. As concrete examples, we implement 1) electronic shelf labels used for retail markets on a large scale and 2) a novel sideview used for mobile applications on smartphones.