...AND CHEAPER...:

In Scott White's vision for the supermarket of the near future, there would be no irritating interruption, no barcodes to scan and no check-outs. Instead shoppers would simply load their trolleys and walk out of a supermarket with wireless technology registering all of the items they have bought from tiny flexible circuits embedded on the food packaging.

It is those small integrated circuits - the equivalent of a silicon chip on a piece of plastic - that PragmatIC Printing, the company which White heads, specialises in. His hope is that the ultra-thin microcircuits will soon feature on wine bottles to tell when a Chablis is at the perfect temperature and on medication blister packs to alert a doctor if an elderly patient has not taken their pills.

"With something which is slimmer than a human hair and very flexible, you can embed that in objects in a way that is not apparent to the user until it is called upon to do something. But also the cost is dramatically lower than with conventional silicon so it allows it to be put in products and packaging that would never justify the cost of a piece of normal electronics," said White.

The main objective is to make everyday objects as intelligent and interactive as our mobile phones, tablets and laptops, he adds.

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