Opportunities of Electronic and Optical Sensors in Autonomous Medical Plasma Technologies

Low temperature plasma technology is proving to be at the frontier of emerging medical technologies with real potential to overcome escalating healthcare challenges including antimicrobial and anticancer resistance. However, significant improvements in efficacy, safety, and reproducibility of plasma treatments need to be addressed to realize the full clinical potential of the technology. To improve plasma treatments recent research has focused on integrating automated feedback control systems into medical plasma technologies to maintain optimal performance and safety. However, more advanced diagnostic systems are still needed to provide data into feedback control systems with sufficient levels of sensitivity, accuracy, and reproducibility. These diagnostic systems need to be compatible with the biological target and to also not perturb the plasma treatment. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art electronic and optical sensors that might be suitable to address this unmet technological need, and the steps needed to integrate these sensors into autonomous plasma systems. Realizing this technological gap could facilitate the development of next-generation medical plasma technologies with strong potential to yield superior healthcare outcomes.

RFID-based sensing in smart packaging for food applications: A review

The global pandemic COVID-19 has led to an increase in the number of people purchasing food online, which has brought to a higher demand on the food supply chain. Such as the need to collect more information related to food safety and quality in real-time. Strengthening management of food logistics information flow can reduce food loss and waste and bring better quality and safety of food to consumers. In this review, the importance and applicability of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology to smart food packaging are described. This study emphasizes the recent advancement of the RFID tags in humidity, temperature, gas, pH, integrity, and traceability sensor applications in connection with food packaging. RFID sensors are more suitable for smart packaging both in terms of sensing ability and data transmission. A simpler, low-cost, more robust and less power-demanding sensors network is the development direction of smart packaging in the future. Chipless RFID sensors have the potential to achieve these functions. But it still faces many challenges to be overcome. For example, biocompatible, cost, reading range, multi-tag collision, multi-parameter sensors, recycling issues, security and privacy of RFID system should be solved.

UHF RFID Temperature Sensor Tag Integrated into a Textile Yarn

This paper presents the design of an ultra high-frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) sensor tag integrated into a textile yarn and manufactured using the E-Thread^® technology. The temperature detection concept is based on the modification of the impedance matching between RFID tag’s antenna and the chip. This modification is created by the change in the resistance of a thermistor integrated within the tag system due to a temperature variation. Moreover, in order to obtain an environment independent detection, a differential approach is proposed that avoids the use of a pre-calibration phase by the use of a reference tag. Experimental characterization demonstrates the RFID sensor’s potential of detecting a temperature variation or a temperature threshold between 25 and 70 °C through the variation of the transmitted differential activation power.

Designing Antennas for RFID Sensors in Monitoring Parameters of Photovoltaic Panels

The importance of the radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology and photovoltaic (PV) systems has been growing systematically in the modern world full of intelligent products connected to the Internet. Monitoring parameters of green energy plants is a crucial issue for efficient conversion of solar radiation, and cheap RFID transponders/sensors can be involved in this process to provide better performance of module supervision in scattered installations. Since many components of PV panels disturb the radio-wave propagation, research in the antenna scope has to be carried out to reach the proposed fusion. The problem with RFID transponders being detuned in close proximity to glass or metal surfaces can be solved on the basis of solutions known from the scientific literature. The authors went further, revealing a new antenna construction that can be fabricated straight on a cover glass of the PV panels. To achieve the established task, they incorporated advantages from the latest advancements in materials technology and low-power electronics and from the progress in understanding radio-wave propagation phenomena. The numerical model of the antenna was elaborated in the Hyper Lynx 3D EM software environment, and test samples were fabricated on the technology line of ML System Company. The convergence of calculated and measured antenna parameters confirms the design correctness. Thus, the studied antenna can be used to elaborate the cheap semipassive RFID transponders/sensors in the PV panel production lines.

Radio Frequency Identification and Sensing Techniques and Their Applications-A Review of the State-of-the-Art

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) sensors, integrating the features of Wireless Information and Power Transfer (WIPT), object identification and energy efficient sensing capabilities, have been considered a new paradigm of sensing and communication for the futuristic information systems. RFID sensor tags featuring contactless sensing, wireless information transfer, wireless powered, light weight, non-line-of-sight transmission, flexible and pasteable are a critical enabling technology for future Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, such as manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, agriculture and food. They have attracted numerous research efforts due to their innovative potential in the various application fields. However, there has been a gap between the in-lab investigations and the practical IoT application scenarios, which has motivated this survey of this research to identify the promising enabling techniques and the underlying challenges. This study aims to provide an exhaustive review on the state-of-art RFID sensor technologies from the system implementation perspective by focusing on the fundamental RF energy harvesting theories, the recent technical progresses and commercial solutions, innovative applications and some RFID sensor based IoT solutions, identify the underlying technological challenges at the time being, and give the future research trends and promising application fields in the rich sensing applications of the forthcoming IoT era.