Passive EPC Class 1 Gen 2 UHF RFID sensor tag For health monitoring applications

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic and degenerative condition that affects millions of Americans. Current approach of PD evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment is mainly qualitative using the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) or the Hoehn and Yahr scale. Assessment of the efficacy of the drugs used is difficult and subjective. A long-term monitoring device that can collect movement data in assisting quantitative analysis proves to be useful and needed. This thesis discusses a discrete prototype of a passive EPC Class 1 Gen 2 UHF RFID sensor tag which is a preliminary step in realizing such a monitoring device. The prototype is capable of collecting 8-bit sensor (temperature, inertial, etc) data and transmits it in real-time through a RFID backscatter link to an UHF reader. It is shown that the device can achieve a read distance up to 3 meters at 5 reads/s and a max data rate of about 640 Kbps.