Design of On-Body Epidermal Antenna on AMC Substrate for UHF RFID in Healthcare

Abstract

This paper presents a compact AMC structure used as a shielding element for a generic wearable RFID tag at UHF frequencies for on-body applications, with an overall footprint limited to an area of only 0.03 λ0 2 (41.4 mm  82.8 mm). Thanks to the isolation provided by the AMC planar structure, the tag antenna gain and reading range are increased of about one order of magnitude in comparison with the case of a conventional tag attached to the human body. The designed antenna is platform tolerant, with a very good robustness and isolation with respect to the human body, exhibiting a high reliability. The AMC structure is implemented on a thin, flexible and biocompatible high permittivity silicon-doped dielectric substrate, with apertures both in the substrate and in the ground plane to allow skin transpiration. Therefore, the presented device can be effectively used also as an epidermal antenna, allowing the "onskin" sampling of the most typical health parameters. The presented configuration has been designed using CST Studio Suite. A prototype has been fabricated and fully characterized, and measured results are in very good agreement with simulations.

Enhancing Laboratory Experience: A Combination of RFID and Machine Learning Techniques to Track Attendance and Upgrade Hardware

“…With advances in the healthcare sector, digitalization, and broad remote aid, there is a growing push for electronic solutions and platforms offering people with the necessities they want to feel in charge of an own monitoring method [1]. "Radiofrequency identification," or RFID for short, is the name given to a method of reading electronic data stored in RFID chips or electronic labels (described below) via radiation.…”