BIT — A framework and architecture for providing digital services for physical products

Mobile phones are increasingly able to read auto-id labels, such as barcodes or RFID tags. As virtually all consumer products sold today are equipped with such a label, this opens the possibility for a wide range of novel digital services building on physical products. In this paper, we discuss the problems that arise when such novel applications are deployed, and present a unified system architecture for providing mobile phone-based digital services in the Internet of Things, called BIT. BIT aims to be a “single point of interaction” for users when accessing the services of a variety of tagged objects. BIT also aids service developers and product manufacturers in deploying services linked to tagged products, by providing a cross-device development and deployment framework. We have used BIT to quickly implement nine diverse services in a prototypical fashion, and report on our inital experiences with the framework.