Thanks to Bluetooth Low Energy ambient energy, and smart devices, smart labels are scaling, writes Eric Cariou, VP New Products, PARAGON ID
For years, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has held promise in industrial and logistics sectors — offering more intelligence than passive RFID, without the power demands of traditional IoT sensors. Yet despite this potential, BLE has never achieved widespread adoption in high-volume track & trace applications until now.
The acceleration of BLE deployment we’re witnessing today is not just the result of better chips or cheaper tags. It’s due to the systemic resolution of three foundational barriers that have historically blocked BLE from scaling: battery maintenance, infrastructure requirements, and sustainability and cost at high volume.
Barrier #1: Battery maintenance — the operational dealbreaker
Battery-powered BLE tags might seem simple enough to deploy, but at scale — tens or hundreds of thousands of crates, pallets, tools, or containers — maintenance quickly becomes a nightmare.
Take the example of a logistics provider tracking 500,000 assets per month. Even if each BLE tag’s battery is rated for three to five years, actual lifespan varies widely depending on heat exposure, signal frequency, and batch quality. In practice, you get a Gaussian distribution: some tags start failing within the first year.
This leaves users with two painful options:
- Preemptive replacement: replace all batteries on a fixed schedule — an expensive and wasteful exercise
- Reactive replacement: fix tags on demand, wherever and whenever they die — which could mean sending a technician to the far end of a warehouse, or worse, to a client’s site
Even worse, access can involve displacing stacked goods with a forklift, extracting the tag, replacing the battery, and possibly reconfiguring the tag on the platform. What’s manageable at small scale becomes prohibitively expensive at enterprise scale. This is the primary reason BLE, despite its technical merits, didn’t take off.
Barrier #2: Disposable tags — unsustainable and soon-to-be outlawed
In an attempt to circumvent maintenance, some providers introduced sealed BLE tags with disposable coin-cell batteries (like CR2032s) that users are meant to throw away after a few years.
The problem? A million tags contain over 300kg of lithium and toxic materials — much of which ends up in landfills. These tags are nearly impossible to recycle, and incompatible with emerging EU regulations targeting circular electronics and producer responsibility.
From both a cost and environmental perspective, disposable BLE tags are a dead end.
Barrier #3: Infrastructure — the hidden cost that kills ROI
Traditional BLE solutions require fixed infrastructure: gateways, cabling, power supply, network integration — often amounting to 70–90% of total project cost. This is justifiable with ultra-cheap RFID tags (at ~€0.04 each) and high asset density, but far less so with more expensive BLE tags and mobile assets.
The real breakthrough came when BLE met the smartphone.
Today, any smartphone or tablet can serve as a BLE scanner via a simple app. This turns existing warehouse staff, drivers, or field teams into mobile infrastructure, eliminating the need for upfront installations and enabling rapid, infrastructure-free deployments.
The Perfect storm: ultra-low-power BLE, ambient energy, and smart devices
We’re seeing the convergence of three enabling technologies:
- Low-power BLE chipsets that operate on microwatts
- Ambient energy harvesting, particularly organic photovoltaic (OPV) materials that work in 1–5 lux environments (i.e. inside warehouses or on robots)
- Universal smartphone compatibility for BLE scanning
This allows for energy-autonomous smart labels, like XgenTag from PARAGON ID, that can be manufactured at scale using roll-to-roll processes. These flexible, battery-free BLE tags can be laminated directly into labels — making them thin, recyclable, and compatible with packaging workflows.
In other words, the logistics industry can finally benefit from BLE’s intelligence without being shackled to maintenance schedules or fixed readers.
From months to days: a new deployment model
With these new capabilities, deployments that previously required months of planning, cabling, and budget approvals can now be piloted in just days. ROI becomes a matter of months, not years.
And once value is proven, additional capabilities — such as fixed anchors, precise indoor location, or AI-powered asset analytics — can be layered in. But critically, the initial investment hurdle is no longer a blocker.
This is already being seen in large-scale pilots and commercial deployments using next-gen BLE tags like XgenTag, where users are moving from demo to rollout in a matter of weeks.
The BLE we’ve been waiting for
Just like QR codes and RFID, BLE will only reach its full potential when it becomes invisible, maintenance-free, and cost-effective. Thanks to ambient IoT, that vision is finally within reach.
The future of logistics and industrial traceability isn’t just connected.
It’s battery-free, smart, and scalable.
With over 20 years of international experience in IoT, innovation, Industry 4.0 traceability, and connected hardware, Eric Cariou has led the development and commercialisation of groundbreaking technologies across Europe, North America, and Asia.
As VP of New Products at PARAGON ID, he oversees the development of next-generation tags and labels for logistics, healthcare, and manufacturing — with a focus on scalable, ultra-low-power, and energy-autonomous solutions.
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