Procurement is playing an increasingly important role in helping major corporations achieve their savings and profitability objectives. What companies buy has been increasing in importance, size, and complexity, and thus, how companies buy has changed. Leading procurement organizations are exploiting several opportunities to leverage the corporate buy, optimize the supply base, minimize linked costs in the supply chain, and maximize the value of goods and services for the users. These opportunities can be described in a systematic framework of strategic sourcing that is applicable to services as well as materials. With the emphasis on shareholder value growth, industry leaders are turning to new business designs to capture and sustain profitable growth. Strategic sourcing can be taken to new levels and applied to the business designs that will shape corporate revenue realization as well as competitive cost position. By building sourcing process excellence and aligning capabilities with the requirements of the corporate buy, procurement can have a key role in the corporate quest for value growth.
Sensor data can be wirelessly transmitted from simple, battery-less tags using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). RFID sensor tags consist of an antenna, a radio frequency integrated circuit chip (RFIC), and at least one sensor. An ideal tag can communicate over a long distance and be seamlessly integrated onto everyday objects. However, miniaturized antenna designs often have lower performance. Here we demonstrate compact, flexible sensor tags with read range comparable to that of conventional rigid tags. We compare fabrication techniques for flexible antennas and demonstrate that screen and stencil printing are both suitable for fabricating antennas; these different techniques are most useful at different points in the design cycle. We characterize two versions of flexible, screen printed folded dipoles and a meandered monopole operating in the 915 MHz band. Finally, we use these antennas to create passive sensor tags and demonstrate over the air communication of sensor data. These tags could be used to form a network of printed, flexible, passive, interactive sensor tags.
While there exists a wide variety of radio frequency (RF) technologies amenable for usage in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), which have been studied separately before, it is currently still unclear how their performance compares in true on-body scenarios. In this paper, a single reference on-body scenario—that is, propagation along the arm—is used to experimentally compare six distinct RF technologies (between 420 MHz and 2.4 GHz) in terms of path loss. To further quantify on-body path loss, measurements for five different on-body scenarios are presented as well. To compensate for the effect of often large path losses, two mitigation strategies to (dynamically) improve on-body links are introduced and experimentally verified: beam steering using a phased array, and usage of on-body RF repeaters. The results of this study can serve as a tool for WBAN designers to aid in the selection of the right RF frequency and technology for their application.
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