A Novel Biosensor Based on Silver-Enhanced Self-Assembled Radio-Frequency Antennas

Abstract

In this letter, we show that a silver-enhancement technique can be used to self-assemble a radio-frequency (RF) antenna, which then can be used for designing a radio-frequency identification (RFID)-based biosensor. Using the proposed biosensor, the concentration of target analytes or pathogens can be remotely interrogated in a concealed, packaged, or in a biohazardous environment, where direct measurement is considered to be impractical. In the presence of the target analytes or pathogens, a silver-enhancement process self-assembles a chain of micromonopole antennas. As the size of the silver-enhanced particles grow, the chain of microantenna segments bridges together to complete a dipole structure that reflects impinging RF signals at a desired frequency. We validate the proof-of-concept for IgG detection and demonstrate that different concentrations of rabbit IgG (ranging from 20 to 60 ng in this letter) can be detected based on the strength of the reflected RF signal received at a 915-MHz COTS RFID reader.Index Terms-Micro-antennas, wireless detection, RFID, silver enhancement, biosensor.

Inkjet printed nanomaterial based flexible radio frequency identification (RFID) tag sensors for the internet of nano things

“…The time response to collect and display the sensing results on the Android smartphone application was less than 1 s. RFID tag sensors have been used for food safety. Yuan et al 242 reported a silver-enhancement method usable for selfassembling a chain of micromonopole RF antennas. The RFIDbased biosensor detected the rabbit IgG within 20 to 60 ng concentrations where a reected RF signal was received at the 915 MHz RFID reader.…”

Wireless Biological Electronic Sensors

“…Inductors are widely used to integrate with capacitors to construct inductor-capacitor (LC) or inductor-capacitor-resistor (LCR) circuits as the sensing devices [ 22 , 59 , 60 ], and the construction of the entire device structure is simple and straightforward. Dipole antennas have also been studied for wireless transmission of sensing signals [ 57 , 61 ].…”

Wireless Biosensing Using Silver-Enhancement Based Self-Assembled Antennas in Passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Tags

“…In [10], we had proposed an alternative concept for implementing a RFID based biosensor. Based on the presence of different concentration levels of target analytes, the structure of the antenna changes leading to the change in the antenna's reflection properties.…”

“…An example of printable tags/sensors are the RFID based humidity sensor reported in [11] which used silver-ink deposited on polymide films. In this paper, we extend the concept proposed in [10] to characterize and optimize the parameters of the sensor using multi-physics finite-element simulations. Also, in this paper we have explored a new application of the self-assembly based sensing that is for detection of moisture/humidity.…”