Cecilia Occhiuzzi

RFID Technology for IoT-Based Personal Healthcare in Smart Spaces

The current evolution of the traditional medical model toward the participatory medicine can be boosted by the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm involving sensors (environmental, wearable, and implanted) spread inside domestic environments with the purpose to monitor the users health and activate remote assistance. RF identification (RFID) technology is now mature to provide part of the IoT physical layer for the personal healthcare in smart environments through low-cost, energy-autonomous, and disposable sensors. It is here presented a survey on the state-of-the-art of RFID for application to body centric systems and for gathering information (temperature, humidity, and other gases) about the users living environment. Many available options are described up to the application level with some examples of RFID systems able to collect and process multichannel data about the human behavior in compliance with the power exposure and sanitary regulations. Open challenges and possible new research trends are finally discussed.

Modeling, Design and Experimentation of Wearable RFID Sensor Tag

Design of effective wearable tags for UHF RFID applications involving persons is still an open challenge due to the strong interaction of the antenna with the human body which is responsible of impedance detuning and efficiency degradation. A new tag geometry combining folded conductors and tuning slots is here discussed through numerical analysis and extensive experimentation also including the integration of a passive motion detector. The achieved designs, having size comparable with a credit card, may be applied to any part of the body. The measured performance indicates a possible application of these body-worn tags for the continuous tracking of human movements in a conventional room.

Passive RFID Strain-Sensor Based on Meander-Line Antennas

The processing of backscattered signals coming from RFID tags is potentially useful to detect the physical state of the tagged object. It is here shown how to design a completely passive UHF RFID sensor for strain monitoring starting from a flexible meander-line dipole whose shape factor and feed section are engineered to achieve the desired sensing resolution and dynamic range. This class of devices is low-cost, promises sub-millimeter resolution and may found interesting applications in the Structural Health Monitoring of damaged structures and vehicles as well as during extreme and adverse events.

Passive UHF RFID antennas for sensing applications: Principles, methods, and classifcations

UHF passive radio-frequency identification technology is rapidly evolving from simple labeling of things to wireless pervasive sensing. A remarkable number of scientific papers demonstrate that objects in principle can have their physical properties be remotely tracked and monitored all along their life cycle. The key background is a new paradigm of antenna design that merges together the conventional communication issues with more-specific requirements about sensitivity to time-varying boundary conditions. This paper presents a unified review of the state of the art of the tag-as-sensor problem. Particular care is taken to formalize the measurement indicators and the communication and sensing tradeoff, with the purpose to provide a first knowledge base for facing a large variety of emerging sensing applications.

RFID Passive Gas Sensor Integrating Carbon Nanotubes

Carbon nanotube (CNT) composites are sensitive to the presence of gases due to their high surface-to-volume ratio and hollow structure that are well suited for gas molecule absorption and storage. Such sensing capability is here integrated with UHF RF identification (RFID) technology to achieve passive and low-cost sensors, remotely readable. CNT film (buckypaper) is used as a localized variable resistive load integrated into a tag antenna, which becomes able to transduce the presence of hazardous gas in the environment, ammonia in this case, into a change of its electromagnetic features. The dynamic range and the hysteresis of the radio sensor are investigated by simulations, equivalent circuits, and articulated experimentations within a true RFID link, providing the proof of concept and some guidelines for tag design.

The RFID Technology for Neurosciences: Feasibility of Limbs' Monitoring in Sleep Diseases

This contribution investigates the feasibility of the passive UHF RF identification technology for the wireless monitoring of human body movements in some common sleep disorders by means of passive tags equipped with inertial switches. Electromagnetic and mechanical models as well as preliminary experimentations are introduced to analyze all the significant issues concerning the required power, the tag antenna design, the read distance, and the expected biosignals collected by the interrogation device.

Humidity Sensing by Polymer-Loaded UHF RFID Antennas

Passive ultra high-frequency radio frequency identification tags, besides item labeling, are also able to exploit capability to sense the physical state of the tagged object as well as of the surrounding environment. Here, a new family of polymer-doped tags are proposed and fully characterized for the detection of ambient humidity. A sensitive chemical species based on PEDOT:PSS is used to load a shaped slot, carved into a folded-like patch tag. The communication and sensing capabilities of the resulting radio-sensor are investigated by means of simulation and measurements that show how to control and balance above opposite requirements by a proper deposition of the sensitive material. The device could have interesting applications in the assessment of the air quality within living and controlled rooms, in the monitoring of the conservation state of foods, in the preservation of walls, and even in the medical field, e.g., to monitor the healing of wounds.

Feasibility of Body-Centric Systems Using Passive Textile RFID Tags

Recent progresses in the design of wearable RFID-tag antennas stimulate the idea of passive body-centric systems, wherein the required power to drive the wearable tags is directly scavenged from the interrogation signal emitted by the reader unit. While active body-centric links have been extensively investigated, the feasibility of passive systems is still questionable, due to the poor sensitivity of the tags and due to the modest reading distances. This paper describes a systematic measurement campaign involving low-profile wearable textile tags in the UHF RFID band. It was demonstrated that both on-body and off-body links are affordable, with a power budget fully compliant with the available technology and the safety standards. The experiments permitted identifying the most-efficient tag placements, and proposing some quantitative and general guidelines useful to characterize and design this kind of new system.

Constrained-Design of Passive UHF RFID Sensor Antennas

Passive UHF RFID tags may be used, beside labeling, to remotely observe the physical/chemical change of the tagged object, through modulation of their impedance and gain, thus acting as sensor antennas. The design of this new class of devices can be mastered by fully understanding the relationship between communication and sensing with the purpose to balance the maximization of the dynamic range of the response with the stability of the read distance. A new kind of communication/sensing nomogram permits to display both behaviors in a unitary way and to predict their physical limits, as well as to formalize a multi-parameter general-purpose optimization methodology. The procedure is demonstrated by application to the design of a strain-gauge tag and of a level-detector wireless sensor.

Sub-Millimeter Displacement Sensing by Passive UHF RFID Antennas

A slotted patch is transformed into a wireless passive UHF-RFID sensor of uni-dimensional displacements by introducing a mechanic-electromagnetic modulation capable to convert sub-millimeter deformations into changes of the antennas response, remotely detectable. A design methodology allows to obtain the desired sensitivity and dynamic range in a fully controllable way. The sensor and the methodology are discussed through the help of preliminary laboratory experimentations on a concrete brick, showing the possibility to achieve resolutions better than 0.1 mm with low cost readers.