A Ground Slotted UHF Tag Antenna For Blood Bags Monitoring

A Flexible and Low-Cost UHF RFID Tag Antenna for Blood Bag Traceability

“…The proposed RFID tag antenna design reaches a maximum reading range with a small size as compared to the other designs listed in Table 2. In addition, the designs reported in [19,22,23] are not flexible; hence, they are not suitable to be attached to blood bags in an easy way. Table 2 also reveals that the proposed RFID tag antenna is the only design that combines inductive and capacitive coupling elements to obtain the conjugate impedance of the IC-chip.…”

“…Passive RFID technology working at ultra-high frequency (UHF) can be used in healthcare infrastructures. Possible applications include tracking of physiological parameters such as patient body temperature [9][10][11][12], blood glucose monitoring [13,14], real-time monitoring, and discrimination of breath anomalies [15], as well as monitoring of blood tubes [16,17] and bags [18][19][20][21][22][23][24] for the management of blood products [25][26][27].…”

“…Other important factors to be considered are reading range and flexibility. Among the available solutions [18][19][20][21][22][23][24], general-purpose commercial UHF RFID tags have reading ranges below 0.5 m when they are attached to blood bags [18], while the others vary from a few centimeters to 1.5 m for blood management systems operating in near-or far-fields [19][20][21][22][23][24]. These commercial and specific RFID tags are mainly of inductive dipole type to facilitate impedance matching with the capacitive ICchip impedance, although some are based on traveling wave antenna [19] or the capacitive dipole type [24].…”

“…These commercial and specific RFID tags are mainly of inductive dipole type to facilitate impedance matching with the capacitive ICchip impedance, although some are based on traveling wave antenna [19] or the capacitive dipole type [24]. Except for three tags [19,22,23], most are flexible. In addition, many flexible tag antennas have been developed for purposes different from the one addressed in this paper [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35].…”

“…The designed UHF RFID tag antenna is fabricated on an adhesive, flexible, and resistant substrate of Kapton polyimide thin film (3M TM Kapton polyimide film tape 5413 amber) [37], thus allowing it to be easily molded and attached to blood bags. The tag antenna is designed to operate optimally in a real environment with a smaller size and larger reading ranges than the available solutions for blood bag traceability [18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. To achieve these goals, blood, the PVC bag, and the Kapton substrate were considered during its design.…”