Sensor-Oriented Passive RFID

Gaetano Marrocco, Cecilia Occhiuzzi, and Francesco Amato

1 Introduction

The recent advances in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) [1] for applications in
mobile and time-varying environments are generating a growing attention to low-
cost and low-power wireless nodes equipped with radio/sensing ability, spatially
distributed to ensure a cooperative monitoring of physical or application-specific
conditions and parameters. Typical fields of applications for WSNs include envi-
ronmental and habitat monitoring, disaster relief [2] healthcare, inventory tracking
and industrial processing monitoring, security and military surveillance, and smart
spaces applications. A novel technological trend is the integration among WSNs and
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies. Such a convergence of sensing
and identification features may enable a wide range of heterogeneous applications,
which demand a tight synergy between detection and tagging.
A new frontier is the wireless monitoring of people within Mobile Healthcare
Services [3] with the purpose to reduce the hospitalization of patients, to support
disaster relief, or to get an epidemic under control. An RFID system could provide
real-time bio-monitoring and localization of patients inside hospitals or domestic
environments, as well as in extreme conditions such as a Space Capsule. In these
cases, the tag should be placed on the human body and equipped with biosensors
(temperature, blood pressure, glucose content, motion) and, when activated by the
reader, tag ID and bio-signals could be transferred to remote units and then stored
and processed.
Up to date, several approaches have been proposed to provide RFID devices with
enhanced sensing and detection capabilities. The main solutions make use of ac-
tive or passive RFID transponders and Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) devices [4].
A significant example of enhanced passive RFID system is given by the Wireless
Identification Sensing Platform (WISP) project [5], which introduced the concept
of ID modulation.

G. Marrocco (), C. Occhiuzzi, and F. Amato

University of Roma Tor Vergata, Dipartimento di Informatica Sistemi e Produzione,
Via del Politecnico, 1-00133 Rome, Italy
e-mail: marrocco@disp.uniroma2.it

D. Giusto et al. (eds.), The Internet of Things: 20th Tyrrhenian Workshop on Digital 273
Communications, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-1674-7 26,
c Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
274 G. Marrocco et al.

These devices could be passive, harvesting energy from the interrogating system,
semi-active when a battery is included only to feed the sensors, or fully active where
a local source directly feeds a microcontroller besides the transmitting radio. How-
ever, the large battery packs required for active techniques, in addition to the use
of protruding antennas, could be suboptimal for some applications and additional
issues have to be considered such as the compromise between a long battery life
and a miniaturized design.
In passive RFIDs, together with the microchip sensitivity, the tag antenna plays
a key role in the overall system performance, such as the reading range and the
compatibility with the tagged object. In case of RFIDs with sensing capability,
the antenna should be additionally suited to electrical and physical integration with
sensing electronics.
The most challenging issues for passive RFID-sensor are:
 The design of tag antennas suited to application over (or even inside) the human
body (or any other high-dielectric object). It generally produces a strong pattern
distortion and reduces the tag efficiency due to energy dissipation and scattering.
 The extraction of the sensed data out of the backscattering response of a passive
tag without the use of any dedicated microcontroller.
The first goal requires the tag design to directly include the presence of a human
body model. Data extraction may be accomplished by consideration that the RFID
tag acts as a digital device, which, when interrogated and energized by a reader, send
back its own ID. Moreover, the tag may be also considered as an analog component
whose strength of backscattered power is sensibly affected by the electrical feature
of the antenna, which is in turn dependent on the tagged object change.
Within this scenario, this contribution is aimed at introducing a procedure to
extract sensing data independently on the observation angle and on the reader-tag
distance. This idea is discussed here for what concerns the sensing of discrete and
continue data. The subject is approached theoretically and experimentally and cor-
roborated by preliminary prototypes for the sensing of material changes and for the
detection of human motion by means of a properly developed wearable tag.

2 Basic Definitions for RFID Systems

At the beginning of the reader-to-tag communication protocol [6], the reader first
activates the tag, placed over a target object, by sending a continuous wave, which,
on charging an internal capacitor, provides the required energy to perform actions.
During this listening mode, the microchip (IC) exhibits an input impedance Zchip D
Rchip C jX chip , with Xchip capacitive, and the antenna impedance ZA D RA C jX A
 

should be matched to Zchip ZA D Zchip for maximum power transfer.
Sensor-Oriented Passive RFID 275

The two-way reader-tag link may be characterized by the equations of the power
collected at the microchip (1) and the power backscattered by the tag toward the
reader (2) and collected by this one:
 2
0
PR!T D GR .; '/GT .; '; ‰/.‰/p Pin (1)
4 d
 4
0
PR T D GR2 .; '/GT2 .; '; ‰/.‰/2p Pin (2)
4 d

where “‰” generically indicates the “sensed quantity,” e.g., a physical or geomet-
rical parameter of the target which has to be monitored by the RFID platform (for
instance, the dielectric permittivity, the thickness or the temperature, the motion).
d is the reader-tag distance, GR is the gain of the reader antenna, GT is the gain of
the tag’s antenna when placed on the target. Pin is the power entering in the reader
antenna, p is the polarization mismatch between the reader and the tag,  is the
power transmission coefficient of the tag,  is a function of the antenna impedance
related to the tag’s radar cross-section and to the modulation impedance Zmod of
the microchip to encode the low and high digital state:

4Rchip RA .‰/
D ˇ ˇ (3)
ˇZchip C ZA .‰/ˇ2
4RA2 .‰/
.‰/ D (4)
jZmod C ZA .‰/j2

The tag is activated when the absorbed power exceeds the tag’s microchip sensitivity
threshold pT , e.g., when PR!T >pT , and hence the maximum read distance is given,
from (1), by s
c EIRPR
dmax .; '/ D  Gtag .; '/ (5)
4 f Pchip

Both Pin and PR T are measurable quantities by the reader and they indirectly
embed some physical information about the tag’s features. However, the mutual
reader-tag position may be generally unknown, preventing the direct use of the
backscattered power to extract the sensing data.

3 Extraction of Sensing Data

A solution to extract some target’s physical information out of the reader’s mea-
surements is the ID-modulation method [7], which is useful when the sensed
quantity takes a discrete number of values or events f‰1 ; ::; ‰N g. The tag has to
276 G. Marrocco et al.

be equipped with at least log2 N microchips so that the ‰n event is discriminated

through a particular combination of transmitted IDs according to a discrete coding.
For instance, to discriminate two events a single microchip could be theoretically
enough so that the first event is associated to the correct tag’s response collected by
the reader interrogation, while the second event to the absence of response. From a
more general point of view, the tag’s antenna has to be designed as a multi-port de-
vice, in which the ports’ impedances are properly affected by the occurrence of the
events [8]. An example of ID modulation is given later on in the case of wearable
motion sensor.
A completely different approach may be followed to extract analog data, e.g.,
when the sensed parameter may vary with continuity within a given range. At this
2
purpose, it is useful to process the ratio PR!T =PR T at the minimum reader’s power
to
Pin activating the tag (turn-on power). In this case, the power PR!T collected by
the microchip will be, by definition, the microchip sensitivity pT and the previous
ratio becomes
pT2  2 .‰/
D Pinto (6)
PR T .‰/
where the dependence on orientation and distance disappears.
 In case the tag’s
modulating impedance is the microchip impedance itself Zmod D Zchip , then the
equation may be rewritten with respect to a reference condition ‰ D ‰0 as
s ˇ ˇ
Pinto .‰/PR T .‰/
ˇZchip C ZA .‰/ˇ
PN .‰/  Dˇ ˇ (7)
Pinto .‰0 /PR T .‰0 / ˇZchip C ZA .‰0 /ˇ

The term PN .‰/ is the geometrical average between the input threshold power and
the backscattered power and is a measurable quantity, indirectly related to the vari-
ations of the target’s parameter through the change of the tag impedance. It is
therefore possible to numerically or experimentally develop a measurement curve
PN $ ‰ relating the variation of the measured response of the tag to the variation of
the target, with no a-priori information about the tag-reader mutual position, regard-
less the presence of multi-path and of any change occurring in the nearby interacting
scenario. The even complex link attenuation is in fact the same for the direct and the
reverse link and hence the overall effect vanishes through the manipulation in (7).

4 Experimentations

Two experimental examples are here reported concerning the sensing of a continu-
ous variable and the detection of discrete events. In the first case, the parameter ‰
is the material of the tagged object, while in the second case the event is any motion
of the human body.
Sensor-Oriented Passive RFID 277

4.1 Sensing of Medium Changes

The RFID sensing technology is here applied to the wireless monitoring of the filling
level h of plastic containers with both low- (sugar powder) and high-dielectric con-
trast (water). In these cases, the sensed quantity is the effective permittivity of the
box container and, in turn, the change of the geometric shape of the target .‰ D h/.
These examples may be representative, for instance, of the monitoring of post-
surgery edema (water case) in some part of the human body and of the state of
cellulites (sugar case).
The box used for the sugar-powder ."s D 2:76; s D 2:44102S=m/ experiment
is made of perspex ."p D 2:7; p 0/. The tag antenna is here a conventional
T-match dipole whose impedance is best matched to a NXP microchip transponder
having input impedance Zchip D 15  j135  when the container is empty.
The estimation of the threshold input power in (6) was performed for three dif-
ferent mutual orientations 0 D f0ı ; 45ı ; 180ıg between reader and tag on the
horizontal plane so that 0 D 180ı corresponds to have the box interposed between
reader and tag. The sugar level is changed in the range 0 < h < 14 cm.
The diagram in Fig. 1 gives the measurement curve computed as in (6) and (7)
for the tag. It is worth noticing that the shape of the curves is not substantially
dependent on the observation angle. The reader starts to detect a significant variation
of the sugar only when its height exceeds 6–8 cm (corresponding to about half the
antenna size). Beyond this condition, the measurement curve appears monotonic
with a 3 dB dynamics.
This sensing modality could be also suited to provide on-off information
 about
the filling state of the container so that a low measured data PN .hS / < 0:75 reveals
that the filling level is decreased below half the antenna size.

Fig. 1 RFID calibration curves for the sensing of the change in the level of sugar
278 G. Marrocco et al.

Fig. 2 RFID calibration curves for the sensing of the change in the level of water

A second test considers a smaller plastic cylindrical container (radius 22 mm,

height 148 mm) with the purpose to detect the change in water level.
The tag antenna is again a simple dipole matched to the microchip when it is
placed over the filled containers. The water level was changed from hW D0 cm to
hW D12 cm. The sensing PN .hS / curve (Fig. 2) is nearly linear with the water level in
the range 0–8 cm e.g., up to nearly half the dipole length.

4.2 Sensing of Body Motion

The human body motion may be detected through a wearable RFID tag equipped
with a simple passive omnidirectional inertial switch to form a two-states (1 bit)
RFID-sensor. The sensor reacts to the applied acceleration by changing its internal
impedance: the main idea is to correlate the sensor state to the microchip activation
with the purpose to earn information about the motion through the ID collected by
the reader, according to an ID modulation paradigm [7]. More in detail, the tag will
transmit its ID when it is at rest while does not transmit anything when is moving, or
vice versa. The wearable tag has to minimize the interaction with the human body
to prevent or at least to reduce the power absorption and therefore to achieve reason-
able read distances. As evolution of the design in [9], the wearable tag considered
here is the series-fed L-type patch sketched in Fig. 3. The rectangular plate has been
folded around a dielectric slab of height hS and the longest face, acting as a ground
plane, is placed over the body through an optional dielectric insulator slab of thick-
ness hI . The polarization is linear, parallel to the antenna main-direction (x axis in
the figure). Assuming that the thickness hS of the inner dielectric is small compared
with the wavelength, the radiation from the folding may be considered negligible
Sensor-Oriented Passive RFID 279

Fig. 3 Layout of the wearable tag for non-contacting sensor

Fig. 4 Simulated and measured power transmission coefficient for the wearable tag antenna

and the gain and the matching features of the antenna mainly related to the slot
and to the transmission line truncation. As for conventional patches, the increase
in the horizontal size W produces a gain enhancement. Depending on the position
of the tag over the body, and on the available space, it is possible to increase that
dimension in order to achieve better radiation performances. The length L of the
patch is chosen approximately equal to =4, where  is the effective wavelength in
the dielectric substrate. While the size of the slot’s central gap is mainly fixed by
the microchip packaging and by the eventual sensing electronics, different shape-
factors and positions for the matching slot may be instead considered. In particular,
the tag design may concentrate on the optimization of the only fa; pg parameters
having fixed the remainings.
A prototype matched to a microchip with input impedance Zchip D 15 j135
has been designed, fabricated and tested in real conditions (Fig. 4 inset).
280 G. Marrocco et al.

Fig. 5 (Left) Measurement setup comprising the short- range reader. (Right) Measured realized
gain for the antenna placed on the torso

The measurement of impedance with the antenna attached over the leg of a volunteer
gives a better than 0.9 power transmission coefficient at 869 MHz with a good agree-
ment with simulated data (Fig. 4).
The realized gain of the tag GT , e.g., the radiation gain of the antenna reduced
by the impedance mismatch, has been measured by using the set-up in Fig. 5 com-
prising a short range, remotely controlled reader CAEN A528 and a quarter-lambda
patch (conventional PIFA) with maximum gain of 3.3 dB, as reader’s antenna. The
measured data are shown in Fig. 5 for the tag placed on the torso, evaluated along
the two principals directions (y and z axis in the figure). As expected, the realized
gain is maximum in front of the antenna while it is negligible in the rear side, due
to the human body absorption. The experienced maximum read distance, by using
the short-range reader (emitting not more than 0.5W EIRP), and tags’ microchip
with typical 30 dBm sensitivity, was 2.1 m. However, by using a long range reader
(emitting up to 3.2 W EIRP), the maximum read distance estimated from (5) could
reach 5.5 m, considerably better than those obtained in [9]. It is worth mentioning
that nearly identical results are obtained when the tag is placed onto different body
segments, such as the leg and the arm, thanks to the folding, which decouples the
radiating part of the antenna from the body.
The integration of the motion sensor requires to properly adapt the antenna de-
sign procedures in order to achieve the modified matching condition
 
ZA D Zchip C Zsensor (8)

where Zsensor D 2:5 C j 20  is the sensor input impedance in the “on” state.
Sensor-Oriented Passive RFID 281

Fig. 6 Comparison of data returned by the MEMS accelerometer (a) with the tag response
received from the RFID Motion Sensor (b)

A prototype of the integrated wearable sensor RFID tag has been hence
experimentally evaluated in real conditions in order to verify the effective com-
munication and sensing performances. Different accelerations, typical of common
human movements, such as walk, run or downfall [10] has been applied to the
tag for various periods and stored by means of the short- range RFID. The move-
ments have been also recorded by common MEMS motion sensor (LIS302DL
by STMicroelectronics). Both MEMS sensor and RFID Motion Sensor have been
placed on the arm and a 16- movements sequence has been executed moving the
limb randomly.
Figure 6 shows the recorded MEMS sensor data (a) and the ID-modulated data
received by the reader (b), where the bars indicate the motion. A significant corre-
lation is visible between the two motion sensors, in term of number of movements,
time and duration. The RFID Motion Sensor is able to monitor every event, regard-
less its standing or magnitude.

5 Conclusions

Designing low-cost antennas for sensing applications is still a great challenge, es-
pecially when the human body is involved. We are just at the beginning and there
are still significant possibility of methodological and technological progress to pur-
sue in the next years. Since the power consumption of the microchip transponder is
continuously reducing, according to a trend similar to the increase in the transistors’
density in computer microprocessors (say the Moore Law), the concurrent research
on antenna design and on smart materials, embedding also sensorial capability, will
prompt new classes of distributed and massive applications, mapping the physical
phenomena into a virtual reality context, accessible from anywhere.
282 G. Marrocco et al.

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