Today, most things in the physical world are tracked passively. A warehouse worker scans an RFID tag. A technician reads a sensor manually. The device itself transmits nothing.

The IoT industry is shifting toward devices that do the opposite: they connect, transmit, and report continuously. The reason is simple, passive devices do not generate enough data to be useful at scale. BLE trackers in logistics and wireless sensors on industrial machines are two examples where this shift is already happening.

Two problems come up repeatedly. First, wireless transmission requires short bursts of high current that standard small batteries cannot reliably deliver without additional components such as supercapacitors, which add cost and board space. Second, industrial environments are hot, a sensor mounted directly on a motor or inside a production line can easily reach 150°C, which is well beyond the limit of conventional Li-ion.

This talk walks through two use cases: a BLE tracker replacing passive RFID in logistics, and a wireless sensor enabling predictive maintenance in high-temperature industrial environments, and shows how solid-state thin-film battery technology makes both viable. The speaker is Dr. Moritz Futscher, CEO and Co-Founder of BTRY AG, an ETH Zürich and Empa spin-off developing and industrialising ultra-thin solid-state batteries designed exactly for these conditions.