RFID Technology for IoT-Based Personal Healthcare in Smart Spaces

TLDR

The evolution toward participatory medicine is supported by IoT sensors in domestic environments, with RFID providing a mature, low‑cost, energy‑autonomous physical layer for personal healthcare. This survey reviews RFID technologies for body‑centric systems and environmental monitoring in smart homes. The authors survey existing RFID solutions for body‑centric and environmental sensing, evaluating their data acquisition capabilities. The survey identifies numerous RFID systems capable of multichannel human‑behavior data collection that comply with power and sanitary regulations, and highlights open challenges and future research directions.

Abstract

The current evolution of the traditional medical model toward the participatory medicine can be boosted by the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm involving sensors (environmental, wearable, and implanted) spread inside domestic environments with the purpose to monitor the user's health and activate remote assistance. RF identification (RFID) technology is now mature to provide part of the IoT physical layer for the personal healthcare in smart environments through low-cost, energy-autonomous, and disposable sensors. It is here presented a survey on the state-of-the-art of RFID for application to body centric systems and for gathering information (temperature, humidity, and other gases) about the user's living environment. Many available options are described up to the application level with some examples of RFID systems able to collect and process multichannel data about the human behavior in compliance with the power exposure and sanitary regulations. Open challenges and possible new research trends are finally discussed.