Low-cost Low-power Small-form-factor Node for Health Monitoring Wireless Multi-Hop Personal Area Networks with Dramatically Increased Range

The medical device field is an emerging technology that has captured the interest of many engineers. The increased life expectancy created the need for reliable real time vital signal monitoring from the comfort of the home, to be transmitted to an Internet database for continuous access of medical personnel. Standard techniques fo

An IPv6-enabled Wireless Shoe-Mounted Platform for Health-monitoring

Abstract — An innovative wearable, partially self-powered, health monitoring and indoor localization shoe-mounted sensor module is presented. The system’s novel shoe sole serves the double role of (i) medical-grade temperature probe for human body monitoring and (ii) renewable energy scavenger, which transforms the human motion to electrical energy. Mounted on the shoe is also an NFC reader for proximitybased localization purposes. An Adidas TM-logo-shaped dualband communication antenna is fabricated that exhibits great performance despite the close proximity to the high lossy human body. The proposed platform can be extended to other sensors applications, for example by embedding into the sole normal and/or shear force sensors in order to monitor the sport performances of the athletes as well as to improve the rehabilitation techniques. Index Terms — dual-band antenna, unobtrusive electronics, wearable electronics, RFID, NFC, health monitoring, WSN I

Performance enhancement of the RFID EPC Gen2 protocol by exploiting collision recovery

Maximizing the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) performance is one of the main challenges in application domains, such as logistics and supply chain management, where the undesired effect of Tag collisions can significantly degrade the speed of the inventory process. The dominating UHF EPC Class-1 Generation- 2 (EPC Gen2) protocol only specifies collision avoidance algorithms but makes no provision for collision resolution. In this paper, performance enhancement of the EPC Gen2 standard exploiting Tag collision recovery is demonstrated, for the first time, in real time with measurements. Three simple and effective approaches to handle successful Tag acknowledgments of recovered collided packets are proposed and implemented on a software-defined Reader and programmable Tags. The attained benefits over the conventional EPC Gen2 MAC scheme are significant: the throughput per time slot is increased by 72% while the overall time required to inventory the Tag population is reduced by 26%. The effectiveness of the proposed approach and the validity of the achieved results are confirmed by the good agreement with simulations reported in the literature