ELECTRICAL SENSING OF GASES IN PACKAGED PRODUCTS AND MONITORING FRESHNESS OR CONDITION OF PERISHABLE PRODUCTS

There is provided a perishable goods monitoring system for monitoring the freshness or condition of a perishable product encapsulated within a package, the system comprising a sensor device, a wireless communication reader device and a processing module, said sensor device comprising a fibrous hydrophilic material based electrical sensor and a wireless communication tag chip coupled thereto and being configured to be incorporated in or on a said package, said wireless communication reader device being configured for wireless communication with said wireless communication tag by means of wireless communication technology when said reader device is within a predetermined distance of said tag, and said processing module being configured to receive sensor data from said sensor, via said reader device, correlate said sensor data against a stored calibration data set associated with said perishable product and determine thereby data representative of freshness of said perishable product.