IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - November 2019 - 38

RF Sensing Technologies for Assisted Daily Living in Healthcare: A Comprehensive Review
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). The RFID chips
were connected to a mobile phone over wireless link to
alert the caregiver or doctor. However, no discussion was
made on the performance of the system.

RFID FOR FALL DETECTION

Figure 9.
Architecture of RFID-based tracking system.

as introduced in [67] where implantable RFID chip was
used as a portable medical record. The RFID technology
integrated with mobile networks [69] and sensors can help
in detecting critical events such as falls or breathe abnormalities [70]. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) and RFIDenabled real-time monitoring of patients was introduced
in [71]. Furthermore, Friesen et al. [61] introduced RFID
driven smart bandages used to monitor patient's postsurgery status via identifying damaged tissues and detecting
body temperature for healing process. A paper published
by Amendola et al. [72] revealed that the applications of
RFID technology for healthcare are still in experimental
stages, however, recent advancement have witnessed scientists and engineers paving the way print-ink-on-skin
like electronic devices used for monitoring patients
through wireless medium for a specific period of time.
Moreover, an RFID-based vital signs monitoring system was introduced by Omar et al. [73] and was named
"Smart Patient Management, Monitoring and Tracking
System Using Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID)
Technology." The primary goal of this system was to
design and develop a reliable and low-cost system for
patients' vital signs monitoring including heart rate, pulse
rate, oxygen saturation and temperature, tracking and data
management. The system exploited microcontroller board
namely Arduino mega 2560 to acquire and pack the sensors data and send it using Wi-Fi communication system
as shown in Figure 9.
Vora et al. [74] introduced vital signs monitoring system capable of detecting normal and abnormal breathing
rate using passive RFID tags. This paper presented that
the identification of the two conditions (i.e., sleep apnea
and bradycardia) are possible using RFID. It was demonstrated that rate showed a correlation of 99% with the
actual heart rate when compared to respiration rate tags.
The sleep apnea condition with a minimum of 10 s threshold was detected. Furthermore, another study conducted
in [75] used microsensors integrated RFID chips to sense
the vital signals such as pulse, temperature, heart beat, and
blood oxygen level. The idea was to reduce the potential
risk of life taking condition in infants, known as the
38

Falling is one of the major health threats to the independent
living of elders, and falling has received much attention in
academia and industry over the past two decades [76].
Many systems have been introduced in the healthcare sector to detect fall events in elderly patients. Schwarzmeier
et al. in [77] presented a fall detection system comprising a
server for data management and different RFID readers
and multiple RFID sensor tags. This system was implemented in such a way that the nurse/caregiver would
receive an alert in case of fall events. The proposed method
was based on the change in the power level for different
human activities and no qualitative results were discussed.
Another fall detection prototype based on the RFID technology where the design and implementation of a motion
detection system based on passive radio frequency identification tags known as TagCare was presented in [76]. The
main findings of this paper were Doppler frequency, which
was exploited to detect human activities and predict fall
event. Extensive experiments were performed to demonstrate the validity and the efficiency of TagCare. It was
observed that this solution presented an accuracy of more
than 96% for detecting incidents such as falls. Hiroto et al.
[78] presented an anomaly detection frameworks based on
Ultra High Frequency (UHF) passive RFID that used the
fluctuations in the RSSI between the RFID pair of tags. The
experiments were performed in indoor environment and
each time an accuracy of more than 98% was achieved.
Similarly, various fall detection systems based on RFID
were introduced in [79]-[81].

RFID FOR VITAL SIGNS MONITORING
Vital signs are a group that show the present status of the
human body's vital functionalities. An intelligent infant
healthcare solution using active RFID tags was proposed
in [82] to reduce some potential risks. This healthcare system could be deployed in a hospital room, leveraging
microsensors integrate RFID used to detect the patient's
vital signs including breathing and blood pressure. Moreover, an unconventional battery-free and wireless infant
heart and respiration rate monitor that uses passive RFID
technology was introduced in [74]. The patient's heart
rate data were transmitted using an RFID tag and respiration rate was determined by monitoring the variation in
the RSSI obtained from the RFID tag. This healthcare
solution reduced the hardware overhead and made possible the continuous monitoring life threatening conditions

IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

NOVEMBER 2019

IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - November 2019

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