Design and Testing of an Epidermal RFID Mechanism in a Smart Indoor Human Tracking System

• Published in: IEEE sensors journal Vol. 21; no. 4; pp. 5476 - 5486
• Main Authors: Rohei, Muhammad Sadiq, Salwana, Ely, Shah, Nordiana Binti Ahmad Kharman, Kakar, Abdul Sattar
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 15.02.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Antennas; Assisted living; Developing countries; epidermal RFID; Epidermis; human tracking system; IoT; LDCs; Middleware; Monitoring; Power gain; Radio frequency identification; RFID tags; Security; security threats; Sensors; Tags; Tracking; Tracking systems; Ultrahigh frequencies
• ISSN: 1530-437X; 1558-1748
• DOI: 10.1109/JSEN.2020.3036233

With the growing of human security concerns globally, high demand of technology is needed for enhancing people's security. The rapid advancement in RFID technology offers an auspicious future to people with robust location tracking for a wide variety of indoor applications, ensuring safer commutes and better monitoring. It can be used to minimize the kidnapping rate predominantly in developing countries where medical professionals are threatened for ransoms. Thus, various RFID solutions have been tested in a number of human tracking systems. However, these solutions are suffered from either being vanished, used by prohibited users or getting damaged as well as systems on the limitations of interfaces, scalability, security or privacy concerns. Therefore, an extensive approach is proposed in this study to evaluate the suitability of epidermal RFID tags (implanted under the skin) in a smart indoor human tracking system. A certified model was produced that aimed to enhance humans' safety by enabling them to obtain IDs using UHF passive RFID tags with regulated frequency of 868 MHz in developing countries. This study mostly emphasized on chip and antenna essentials such as released power gain, polarization, and read distance in order to assess the efficiency of RFID tags on their appropriateness for epidermal applications in human security. The results showed that the simulated tag had a high transmission rate with a corresponding factor of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\boldsymbol {\gamma } =0 </tex-math></inline-formula>:6, almost 1:57 dBi power gain, and a reading distance of nearly 4 meters was achieved that indicated the suitability of the tag for use in human tracking systems. The mechanism then being implemented to a smart indoor human tracking system with a user-friendly middleware that worked well and able to guarantee indoor human security.