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-ofthe-art of RFID for application to bodycentric 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.

Design of effective wearable tags for UHF RFID applications involving persons is still an open challenge due to the strong interaction of the antenna with the human body which is responsible of impedance detuning and efficiency degradation. A new tag geometry combining folded conductors and tuning slots is here discussed through numerical analysis and extensive experimentation also including the integration of a passive motion detector. The achieved designs, having size comparable with a credit card, may be applied to any part of the body. The measured performance indicates a possible application of these body-worn tags for the continuous tracking of human movements in a conventional room.

The processing of backscattered signals coming from RFID tags is potentially useful to detect the physical state of the tagged object. It is here shown how to design a completely passive UHF RFID sensor for strain monitoring starting from a flexible meander-line dipole whose shape factor and feed section are engineered to achieve the desired sensing resolution and dynamic range. This class of devices is low-cost, promises sub-millimeter resolution and may found interesting applications in the Structural Health Monitoring of damaged structures and vehicles as well as during extreme and adverse events.

Abstract-UHF passive Radio Frequency Identification technology is rapidly evolving from simple labeling to wireless pervasive sensing. A remarkable number of scientific papers demonstrate that objects could be in principle remotely tracked and monitored in their physical properties all along their daylife. The key background is a new paradigm of antenna design that merges together the conventional communication issues with more specific requirements about sensitivity to time-varying boundary conditions. This paper proposes a unified introdution to the tag-as-sensor problem with particular care to formalize the measurement indicators and the communication and sensing trade-off, with the purpose to understand and classify the state of the art and definitley provide a knowledge base to face a large variety of emerging applications.

Abstract-Passive ultra high-frequency radio frequency identification tags, besides item labeling, are also able to exploit capability to sense the physical state of the tagged object as well as of the surrounding environment. Here, a new family of polymer-doped tags are proposed and fully characterized for the detection of ambient humidity. A sensitive chemical species based on PEDOT:PSS is used to load a shaped slot, carved into a foldedlike patch tag. The communication and sensing capabilities of the resulting radio-sensor are investigated by means of simulation and measurements that show how to control and balance above opposite requirements by a proper deposition of the sensitive material. The device could have interesting applications in the assessment of the air quality within living and controlled rooms, in the monitoring of the conservation state of foods, in the preservation of walls, and even in the medical field, e.g., to monitor the healing of wounds.

Carbon nanotube (CNT) composites are sensitive to the presence of gases due to their high surface-to-volume ratio and hollow structure that are well suited for gas molecule absorption and storage. Such sensing capability is here integrated with UHF RF identification (RFID) technology to achieve passive and lowcost sensors, remotely readable. CNT film (buckypaper) is used as a localized variable resistive load integrated into a tag antenna, which becomes able to transduce the presence of hazardous gas in the environment, ammonia in this case, into a change of its electromagnetic features. The dynamic range and the hysteresis of the radio sensor are investigated by simulations, equivalent circuits, and articulated experimentations within a true RFID link, providing the proof of concept and some guidelines for tag design.Index Terms-Nanotube, passive gas sensor, RF identification (RFID).

Abstract-Numerical processing of passive UHF-RFID tags' response may provide physical insight about the hosting object or about the nearby environment. This idea is here extended to implanted antennas with the purpose to sense the evolution of some human physiological and pathological process involving a local change of effective permittivity inside the body. The goal is to understand how master the design of this class of devices taking into account both communication and sensing capabilities. An ad hoc design methodology is here presented and discussed by means of a realistic medical case concerning the modification of an endo-vascular device to achieve a STENTag able to sense the state of the vessel wherein it has been implanted.Index Terms-Biosensor, implantable biomedical device, passive sensing, RFID.

Recent progresses in the design of wearable RFID-tag antennas stimulate the idea of passive body-centric systems, wherein the required power to drive the wearable tags is directly scavenged from the interrogation signal emitted by the reader unit. While active body-centric links have been extensively investigated, the feasibility of passive systems is still questionable, due to the poor sensitivity of the tags and due to the modest reading distances. This paper describes a systematic measurement campaign involving low-profi le wearable textile tags in the UHF RFID band. It was demonstrated that both on-body and off-body links are affordable, with a power budget fully compliant with the available technology and the safety standards. The experiments permitted identifying the most-effi cient tag placements, and proposing some quantitative and general guidelines useful to characterize and design this kind of new system.