Design and Implementation of Intelligent Tape for Monitoring High-Price and Fragile Cargo Shipments During Transport Procedures

Recently, the expansion of e-commerce is leading to a massive increase in e-commerce transactions. At present, e-commerce has been accepted by most consumers, who have begun to purchase high-price and fragile goods via e-commerce. However, a major problem that current logistics companies must consider is how to ensure the safe delivery of such high-price or fragile goods. To resolve this issue, this paper proposes a type of intelligent tape, named iTape, for monitoring high-priced and fragile cargo during transport procedures. The proposed iTape can directly replace the current commercial tape used in the packaging of cargo boxes. Moreover, the proposed iTape can immediately detect when cargo is heavily dropped or stolen (corresponding to tear-off of the tape) during the delivery process. To avoid the possibility of abnormal charging and discharging, a thin-film piezoresistive pressure sensor is adopted as the sensing element of the proposed iTape. In contrast to piezoelectric pressure sensors, piezoresistive sensors operate based on the principle that the resistance value of a material under mechanical stress changes, causing the output voltage signal to vary with pressure. Experimental results prove that the proposed iTape can detect and record heavy dropping or tape tear-off events. The experimental results also show that the detection accuracy for heavy dropping events is greater than 90% and the detection accuracy for tape tear-off events is 100%. Therefore, the proposed iTape can help logistics providers ensure delivery quality for high-price and fragile cargo.