Performance of Epidermal RFID Dual-loop Tag and On-Skin Retuning

Abstract

Originally introduced by the Material Science community, the Epidermal Electronics is now collecting interest also among Antenna engineers for the potentiality to achieve thin and flexible sensing transponders that are suitable to application over the epidermis. Unlike conventional wearable antennas, which are generally decoupled by the lossy human body by means of spacers or shielding sheets, epidermal tags need to be placed at a very close touch with the skin thus providing poor communication capabilities. This paper investigates, by means of a detailed numerical and experimental study, the performance of an epidermal dual-loop tag for UHF Radiofrequency Identification (RFID) depending on the specific placement over different parts of the human body and for a variety of volunteers. An on-body tuning mechanism is also introduced and demonstrated in real applications at the purpose to improve the tag response and hence to enable the use of a same tag layout for all the UHF RFID bands and for several placement loci.

Low-Cost Inkjet-Printed RFID Tag Antenna Design for Remote Healthcare Applications

“…All components are modeled in simulation for more precise results. The human body is simulated using a 4-layered model with parameters described in [32]. Furthermore, the simulated gain of the proposed tag on water, IV solution, blood, and the human body (a four-layer model) is shown in Fig.…”

Wireless Body Area Networking: Joint Physical-Networking Layer Simulation and Modeling

“…As an example, meander antennas are used to design miniaturized ultra-high frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) tags [12]. These tags are becoming popular in WBAN applications [13]. Overall, applying the meandering concept to design wearable antennas can help reduce the size of the antenna.…”

Low‐Profile Flexible UHF RFID Tag Design for Wristbands Applications

“…Furthermore, if the wearable RFID tag is in close proximity or directly in contact with the human body (on-body), the electrical wavelength, impedance matching, and radiation efficiency of the RFID tag will be deteriorated [1,2]. The effects on the realized gain of an RFID tag when attached onto different body regions (arm, forearm, forehead, neck, abdomen, and stern) of a thin female volunteer were reported in [3], and they show that the stern region has the worst gain, whereas the leg region has the best gain, because of the larger content of fat tissues.…”