Research Article
RFIDDouble-LoopTagswithNovelMeanderingLinesDesignfor
Health Monitoring Application
Ibtissame Bouhassoune ,
1
Rachid Saadane,
2
and Khalid Minaoui
1
1
LRIT Laboratory, Faculty of Science, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco
2
SIRC/LaGeS-EHTP, EHTP Km 7 Route El Jadida, Oasis, Morocco
Correspondence should be addressed to Ibtissame Bouhassoune; i.bouhassoune@gmail.com
Received 24 March 2019; Revised 16 July 2019; Accepted 25 August 2019; Published 1 October 2019
Guest Editor: Sandra Costanzo
Copyright©2019IbtissameBouhassouneetal.isisanopenaccessarticledistributedundertheCreativeCommonsAttribution
License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
In this paper, we propose a design of two compact and miniaturized RFID epidermal tags in the UHF band for health monitoring
applications. e two conceptions of meandered double-loop antennas with T-match configuration, namely, a double-loop
antenna with meandered line in the horizontal direction and a double-loop antenna with meandered lines in two directions, are
placed at very close distance from the human body. e proposed tags are composed of bio-silicone substrate, to protect the
human skin from the electromagnetic waves, and a copper conductor loaded by T-match configuration, to suit the complex
impedance of the antenna to that of the chip. We have performed numerical simulations of these conceptions of two tags using the
HFSS and CSTsolvers. Our results show two optimal sizes with a high communication performance, good matching features, and
a large read range. We placed afterwards these two optimized tags in an elliptical environment to test their flexibility and examine
their performance on different parts of the human body.
1.Introduction
One of the most striking evolutions of radiofrequency
identification (RFID) is manifested in the epidermal RFID
family for human health monitoring applications and in-
door/outdoor tracking systems. is new RFID technology
plays two roles, the first one is to identify different objects,
and the second one is to sense physiological parameters of
the human body (temperature, pressure, heartbeat, etc.).
erefore, the healthcare system can be highly developed
and monitored in the long term.
e RFID system is composed of remote tags and in-
terrogators or readers devices. e former has the poten-
tiality to properly collect the energy from the readers and
store the data in the microchip, while the latter transmit and
receive the radio waves to communicate with tags [1] (see
Figure 1).
e RFID tags can be passive without an internal power
source, collecting energy from the interrogator, or semi-
passivewhenabatteryisusedonlytopowerandrunthechip
or other electronic components, and can be active when the
tag has its own local alimentation system, which directly
feeds a tag chip and the transmitting radio channel [2].
e epidermal RFID tags are placed in direct touch with
human skin, and fabricated with a very thin, flexible, and
biocompatible material, acting as an insulator between the
conductor/electronic components and the skin. However,
the cohabitation of passive tag elements with the human skin
represents a complex challenge due to high losses in human
tissues which strongly affect the general properties of the
antenna. e electromagnetic waves emitted by the reader
are either reflected or absorbed by the human tissue, and
therefore, the performance of the wireless communication
diminishes [3]. Most of the scientific researchers presented
until now have been oriented to integrate the antenna with
the lossy body, while maintaining the best characteristics of
the antenna.
e epidermal RFID technology has been focused first
on the near field, at 13.56 MHz (HF RFID), thanks to its
insensitivity to the presence of living tissues and its
Hindawi
International Journal of Antennas and Propagation
Volume 2019, Article ID 5076139, 12 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/5076139