A Smart Archive Box for Museum Artifact Monitoring Using Battery-Less Temperature and Humidity Sensing

Abstract

For the first time, this paper reports a smart museum archive box that features a fully integrated wireless powered temperature and humidity sensor. The smart archive box has been specifically developed for microclimate environmental monitoring of stored museum artifacts in cultural heritage applications. The developed sensor does not require a battery and is wirelessly powered using Near Field Communications (NFC). The proposed solution enables a convenient means for wireless sensing with the operator by simply placing a standard smartphone in close proximity to the cardboard archive box. Wireless sensing capability has the advantage of enabling long-term environmental monitoring of the contents of the archive box without having to move and open the box for reading or battery replacement. This contributes to a sustainable preventive conservation strategy and avoids the risk of exposing the contents to the external environment, which may result in degradation of the stored artifacts. In this work, a low-cost and fully integrated NFC sensor has been successfully developed and demonstrated. The developed sensor is capable of wirelessly measuring temperature and relative humidity with a mean error of 0.37 °C and ±0.35%, respectively. The design has also been optimized for low power operation with a measured peak DC power consumption of 900 μW while yielding a 4.5 cm wireless communication range. The power consumption of the NFC sensor is one of the lowest found in the literature. To the author’s knowledge, the NFC sensor proposed in this paper is the first reporting of a smart archive box that is wirelessly powered and uniquely integrated within a cardboard archive box.

Highly Sensitive and Ultra-Responsive Humidity Sensors Based on Graphene Oxide Active Layers and High Surface Area Laser-Induced Graphene Electrodes

“…In the presented design, both voltage and frequency scaling (VFS) techniques were used to minimize the DC power consumption of the developed sensor with the aim to maximize the wireless communication range. To achieve sub-mW DC power consumption, the NFC-enabled humidity sensor was designed with optimal settings: MCU peripheral clock ( f CLK ) = 0.524 MHz; I2C core input clock ( f I2C_IN ) = 1.028 MHz; MCU core voltage ( V CORE ) = 1.2 V; supply voltage ( V DD ) of 2.1 V. As a result, the NFC-enabled humidity sensor required a peak DC power of just 900 µW, which is one of the lowest reported in the literature [ 59 ]. A Samsung Galaxy S21 smartphone was used to measure the wireless communication range, achieving a maximum of 4.5 cm in free-space.…”

State-of-the-Art Sensors Research in Ireland

“…The paper by Gawade et al [24] reports on a smart museum archive box that features a fully integrated, wireless powered temperature and humidity sensor. The smart archive box has been specifically developed for microclimate environmental monitoring of stored museum artifacts in cultural heritage applications.…”

A Concertina-Shaped Vibration Energy Harvester-Assisted NFC Sensor With Improved Wireless Communication Range

“…From the application perspective, amongst the popular wireless communication platforms such as NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT), SigFox (a French global network provider), Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN), Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Near Field Communication (NFC), the NFC technology offers a unique benefit of a very low power requirement [33] while transmitting data. Recent studies have reported that typically, 900 μW of power is consumed by NFC-based sensor interfaces while offering a communication range up to 4.5 cm [34], [35], [36], [37]. The communication range of the NFC platform largely depends on the several parameters, such as reader type, NFC antenna size, coupling between NFC reader and tag, RFID air interface, and power consumption of the front-end electronics.…”

“…The communication range of the NFC platform largely depends on the several parameters, such as reader type, NFC antenna size, coupling between NFC reader and tag, RFID air interface, and power consumption of the front-end electronics. With NFC type 5 enabled smartphone as a reader, a maximum communication range of 7 cm could be achieved, which increases to 1 m when a 13.56 MHz reader (ISO/IEC 15693) is employed [34], [38]. Nowadays, the inclusion of the NFC technology in smartphones enables on-call data acquisition through reader/smartphones, which substantially reduces the installation cost of the NFC sensors [34], [39].…”

“…With NFC type 5 enabled smartphone as a reader, a maximum communication range of 7 cm could be achieved, which increases to 1 m when a 13.56 MHz reader (ISO/IEC 15693) is employed [34], [38]. Nowadays, the inclusion of the NFC technology in smartphones enables on-call data acquisition through reader/smartphones, which substantially reduces the installation cost of the NFC sensors [34], [39]. This allows frictionless migration of the data from the edge to the cloud, which paves the way for a number of low communication-range applications, such as health monitoring [40], food quality monitoring [41], gas monitoring [42], structural health monitoring [43], etc.…”