In the retail world, customer satisfaction, liability, and regulatory aspects are challenging to keep register prices in agreement with shelf label prices. It can take millions of dollars in resources to staff and manually change the price on multiple products per store, per day. As the industry shifts, there is explosive growth predicted as the retail industry forecasts billions of ESLs to be installed across the Americas, Europe, and Asia by 2021.
To cope with this, Ossia comes out with the first ever wirelessly powered, battery-free, wire-free Electronic Shelf Label (ESL) system. Ossia will be demonstrating a mockup of a retail store aisle showcasing the Cota-powered ESLs at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7-10, 2020.
The challenge ESLs face today with coin cell batteries is the dramatic restriction of the potential due to replacement costs, logistics and environmental impacts. ESLs with coin cell batteries have more limited functionality in the number of updates per day, multi-color displays and attention-getting LEDs.
The status quo battery-powered ESL solution makes it challenging for mass market adoption in the retail environment. Conversely, Ossia’s Cota wireless power enables many new applications for ESLs that are not possible with batteries, such as active displays with notifications to employees, dynamic guidance for order picking and marketing/advertising opportunities.
The Cota system is flexible and scalable for supporting small, medium and very large retail deployments. Enabling hassle- free use of ESLs with minimal human interaction after deployment. Cota battery-less ESLs are hermetically sealed, reducing external humidity to extend the lifespan and quality of displays. Cota-enabled ESLs can be seen at CES with 4.2” displays, while adding three colors. Smaller displays, such as 2.7” and 2.3”, are in the works for deployments. Finally, the Cota ESL technology can support 1,000+ ESLs per Cota transmitter.
The Cota-powered ESL is environmentally friendly and doesn’t materially interfere with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zibgee, or other wireless technologies. Once the Cota transmitter is installed into a retail environment, it can wirelessly power other devices in addition to ESL’s such as handheld prices scanners, environmental and safety sensors and eventually, consumer mobile devices.
Hordon Kim, International Editor, hordon@powerelectronics.co.kr
