research-article

Towards Wearable Everyday Body-Frame Tracking using Passive RFIDs

Authors:

Jason I. HongAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, Volume 1, Issue 4

Article No.: 145, Pages 1 - 23

https://doi.org/10.1145/3161199

Published: 08 January 2018 Publication History

Abstract

We introduce RF-Wear, an accurate and wearable solution to track movements of a user's body using passive RFIDs embedded in their clothing. RF-Wear processes wireless signals reflected off these tags to a compact single-antenna RFID reader in the user's pocket. In doing so, RF-Wear enables a first-of-its-kind body-frame tracking mechanism that is lightweight and convenient for day-to-day use, without relying on external infrastructure. At the heart of RF-Wear is a novel primitive that computes angles between different parts of the user's body using the RFID tags attached to them. RF-Wear achieves this by treating groups of RFID tags as an array of antennas whose orientation can be computed accurately relative to the handheld reader. By computing the orientation of individual body parts, we demonstrate how RF-Wear reconstructs the real-time posture of the user's entire body frame. Our solution overcomes multiple challenges owing to the interactions of wireless signals with the body, the 3-D nature of human joints and the flexibility of fabric on which RFIDs are placed. We implement and evaluate a prototype of RF-Wear on commercial RFID readers and tags and demonstrate its performance in body-frame tracking. Our results reveal a mean error of 8--12° in tracking angles at joints that rotate along one degree-of-freedom, and 21°- azimuth, 8°- elevation for joints supporting two degrees-of-freedom.

Supplementary Material

jin (jin.zip)

Supplemental movie, appendix, image and software files for, Towards Wearable Everyday Body-Frame Tracking using Passive RFIDs

Download
6.42 MB

References

[1]

2017. TSL 1153 Bluetooth UHF RFID Reader. https://www.atlasrfidstore.com/tsl-1153-bluetooth-uhf-rfid-reader/. (2017). (Accessed on 05/15/2017).

[2]

Fadel Adib, Zachary Kabelac, Dina Katabi, and Robert C Miller. 3D Tracking via Body Radio Reflections.

[3]

Eric R Bachmann, I Duman, UY Usta, Robert B McGhee, XP Yun, and MJ Zyda. 1999. Orientation tracking for humans and robots using inertial sensors. In Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation, 1999. CIRA‘99. Proceedings. 1999 IEEE International Symposium on. IEEE, 187--194.

[4]

Alan Bränzel, Christian Holz, Daniel Hoffmann, Dominik Schmidt, Marius Knaust, Patrick Lühne, René Meusel, Stephan Richter, and Patrick Baudisch. 2013. GravitySpace: tracking users and their poses in a smart room using a pressure-sensing floor. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 725--734.

Digital Library

[5]

Ke-Yu Chen, Kent Lyons, Sean White, and Shwetak Patel. 2013. uTrack: 3D input using two magnetic sensors. In Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology. ACM, 237--244.

Digital Library

[6]

Salvatore Chiaravalloti, Filip Idzikowski, and Lukasz Budzisz. 2011. Power consumption of WLAN network elements. Tech. Univ. Berlin, Tech. Rep. TKN-11-002 (2011).

[7]

P Daponte, J De Marco, L De Vito, B Pavic, and S Zolli. 2011. Electronic measurements in rehabilitation. In Medical Measurements and Applications Proceedings (MeMeA), 2011 IEEE International Workshop on. IEEE, 274--279.

[8]

Artem Dementyev, Hsin-Liu Cindy Kao, and Joseph A Paradiso. 2015. Sensortape: Modular and programmable 3d-aware dense sensor network on a tape. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software 8 Technology. ACM, 649--658.

Digital Library

[9]

Han Ding, Longfei Shangguan, Zheng Yang, Jinsong Han, Zimu Zhou, Panlong Yang, Wei Xi, and Jizhong Zhao. 2015. Femo: A platform for free-weight exercise monitoring with rfids. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems. ACM, 141--154.

Digital Library

[10]

Jonny Farringdon, Andrew J Moore, Nancy Tilbury, James Church, and Pieter D Biemond. 1999. Wearable sensor badge and sensor jacket for context awareness. In Wearable Computers, 1999. Digest of Papers. The Third International Symposium on. IEEE, 107--113.

[11]

Brian P Flanagan and Kristine L Bell. 2001. Array self-calibration with large sensor position errors. Signal Processing 81, 10 (2001), 2201--2214.

[12]

Sean Follmer, Daniel Leithinger, Alex Olwal, Nadia Cheng, and Hiroshi Ishii. 2012. Jamming user interfaces: programmable particle stiffness and sensing for malleable and shape-changing devices. In Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology. ACM, 519--528.

Digital Library

[13]

B Gupta, S Sankaralingam, and S Dhar. 2010. Development of wearable and implantable antennas in the last decade: A review. In Microwave Symposium (MMS), 2010 Mediterranean. IEEE, 251--267.

[14]

John Hewitt. 2013. The MYO Gesture-Control Armband Sense Your Muscle's Movements, ExtremeTech (online magazine), Feb. 27. (2013).

[15]

Tran Nhat Hung and Young Soo Suh. 2013. Inertial sensor-based two feet motion tracking for gait analysis. Sensors 13, 5 (2013), 5614--5629.

[16]

Takeo Igarashi and John F Hughes. 2006. Clothing manipulation. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Courses. ACM, 21.

Digital Library

[17]

Impinj Inc. 2017. Speedway Reader R420. https://www.impinj.com/platform/connectivity/speedway-r420/. (2017).

[18]

RFID Insider. 2014. RFID Readers For Mobile Phones From TSL. http://blog.atlasrfidstore.com/rfid-readers-mobile-phones-tsl. (2014).

[19]

Tiiti Kellomäki, Johanna Virkki, Sari Merilampi, and Leena Ukkonen. 2012. Towards washable wearable antennas: a comparison of coating materials for screen-printed textile-based UHF RFID tags. International Journal of Antennas and Propagation 2012 (2012).

[20]

Goojo Kim, Jinseong Lee, Kyoung Hwan Lee, You Chung Chung, Junho Yeo, Byung Hyun Moon, Jeenmo Yang, and Hee Cheol Kim. 2008. Design of a UHF RFID fiber tag antenna with electric-thread using a sewing machine. In Microwave Conference, 2008. APMC 2008. Asia-Pacific. IEEE, 1--4.

[21]

Yeonho Kim, Kyounghwan Lee, Yongju Kim, and You Chung Chung. 2007. Wearable UHF RFID tag antenna design using flexible electro-thread and textile. In Antennas and Propagation Society International Symposium, 2007 IEEE. IEEE, 5487--5490.

[22]

Hanchuan Li, Can Ye, and Alanson P Sample. 2015. IDSense: A human object interaction detection system based on passive UHF RFID. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2555--2564.

Digital Library

[23]

Hanchuan Li, Peijin Zhang, Samer Al Moubayed, Shwetak N Patel, and Alanson P Sample. 2016. Id-match: A hybrid computer vision and rfid system for recognizing individuals in groups. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 4933--4944.

Digital Library

[24]

Tianxing Li, Chuankai An, Zhao Tian, Andrew T Campbell, and Xia Zhou. 2015. Human sensing using visible light communication. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. ACM, 331--344.

Digital Library

[25]

Thomas B Moeslund and Erik Granum. 2001. A survey of computer vision-based human motion capture. Computer vision and image understanding 81, 3 (2001), 231--268.

Digital Library

[26]

Leap Motion. 2015. Leap motion controller. URl: https://www.leapmotion.com (2015).

[27]

Gauri Nanda, Adrian Cable, V Michael Bove, Moneta Ho, and Han Hoang. 2004. bYOB [Build Your Own Bag]: a computationally-enhanced modular textile system. In Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile and ubiquitous multimedia. ACM, 1--4.

Digital Library

[28]

Lionel M Ni, Yunhao Liu, Yiu Cho Lau, and Abhishek P Patil. 2004. LANDMARC: indoor location sensing using active RFID. Wireless networks 10, 6 (2004), 701--710.

[29]

Pavel V Nikitin and KV Seshagiri Rao. 2010. Compact Yagi antenna for handheld UHF RFID reader. In Antennas and Propagation Society International Symposium (APSURSI), 2010 IEEE. IEEE, 1--4.

[30]

Cecilia Occhiuzzi, Stefano Cippitelli, and Gaetano Marrocco. 2010. Modeling, design and experimentation of wearable RFID sensor tag. IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation 58, 8 (2010), 2490--2498.

[31]

Ryo Ohsawa, Masayuki Iwai, Takuya Imaeda, Kei Suzuki, Takuro Yonezawa, Kazunori Takashio, and Hideyuki Tokuda. 2006. Smartfuroshiki: A sensorized fabrics supporting office activities. In UbiComp‘06: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 9.

[32]

Natural Point. 2011. Optitrack. Natural Point, Inc., [Online]. Available: http://www.naturalpoint.com/optitrack/.[Accessed 22 2 2014] (2011).

[33]

Ivan Poupyrev, Nan-Wei Gong, Shiho Fukuhara, Mustafa Emre Karagozler, Carsten Schwesig, and Karen E Robinson. 2016. Project Jacquard: Interactive Digital Textiles at Scale. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 4216--4227.

Digital Library

[34]

Qifan Pu, Sidhant Gupta, Shyamnath Gollakota, and Shwetak Patel. 2013. Whole-home gesture recognition using wireless signals. In Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on Mobile computing 8 networking. ACM, 27--38.

Digital Library

[35]

Damien Rohmer, Tiberiu Popa, Marie-Paule Cani, Stefanie Hahmann, and Alla Sheffer. 2010. Animation wrinkling: augmenting coarse cloth simulations with realistic-looking wrinkles. In ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), Vol. 29. ACM, 157.

[36]

Ralph Schmidt. 1986. Multiple emitter location and signal parameter estimation. IEEE transactions on antennas and propagation 34, 3 (1986), 276--280.

[37]

Jamie Shotton, Toby Sharp, Alex Kipman, Andrew Fitzgibbon, Mark Finocchio, Andrew Blake, Mat Cook, and Richard Moore. 2013. Real-time human pose recognition in parts from single depth images. Commun. ACM 56, 1 (2013), 116--124.

Digital Library

[38]

Tien-Wei Shyr, Jing-Wen Shie, Chang-Han Jiang, and Jung-Jen Li. 2014. A textile-based wearable sensing device designed for monitoring the flexion angle of elbow and knee movements. Sensors 14, 3 (2014), 4050--4059.

[39]

Andrew Spielberg, Alanson Sample, Scott E Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff, and James McCann. 2016. RapID: A framework for fabricating low-latency interactive objects with RFID tags. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 5897--5908.

Digital Library

[40]

ThingMagic. 2017. ThingMagic M6E Family: Performance, Efficiency and Flexibility - Tech Spec Sheets. (2017). (Accessed on 10/16/2017).

[41]

James Tribe, Dumtoochukwu Oyeka, John Batchelor, Navjot Kaur, Diana Segura-Velandia, Andrew West, Robert Kay, Katia Vega, and Will Whittow. 2015. Tattoo antenna temporary transfers operating on-skin (TATTOOS). In International Conference of Design, User Experience, and Usability. Springer, 685--695.

Digital Library

[42]

Leena Ukkonen, Lauri Sydänheimo, and Markku Kivikoski. 2007. Read range performance comparison of compact reader antennas for a handheld UHF RFID reader. In RFID, 2007. IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 63--70.

[43]

Jue Wang, Deepak Vasisht, and Dina Katabi. 2015. RF-IDraw: virtual touch screen in the air using RF signals. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 44, 4 (2015), 235--246.

Digital Library

[44]

Shiqi Wang, Ngai Lok Chong, Johanna Virkki, Toni Björninen, Lauri Sydänheimo, and Leena Ukkonen. 2015. Towards washable electrotextile UHF RFID tags: Reliability study of epoxy-coated copper fabric antennas. International Journal of Antennas and Propagation 2015 (2015).

[45]

Roy Want. 2006. An introduction to RFID technology. IEEE pervasive computing 5, 1 (2006), 25--33.

Digital Library

[46]

Teng Wei and Xinyu Zhang. 2016. Gyro in the air: tracking 3D orientation of batteryless internet-of-things. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. ACM, 55--68.

Digital Library

[47]

Jie Xiong and Kyle Jamieson. 2013. ArrayTrack: A Fine-Grained Indoor Location System. In NSDI. 71--84.

[48]

Lei Yang, Yekui Chen, Xiang-Yang Li, Chaowei Xiao, Mo Li, and Yunhao Liu. 2014. Tagoram: Real-time tracking of mobile RFID tags to high precision using COTS devices. In Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking. ACM, 237--248.

Digital Library

[49]

Lining Yao, Jifei Ou, Chin-Yi Cheng, Helene Steiner, Wen Wang, Guanyun Wang, and Hiroshi Ishii. 2015. BioLogic: natto cells as nanoactuators for shape changing interfaces. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 1--10.

Digital Library

[50]

Yang Zhang, Junhan Zhou, Gierad Laput, and Chris Harrison. 2016. Skintrack: Using the body as an electrical waveguide for continuous finger tracking on the skin. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 1491--1503.

Digital Library

[51]

Zhengyou Zhang. 2012. Microsoft kinect sensor and its effect. IEEE multimedia 19, 2 (2012), 4--10.

Digital Library

Cited By

Tavanti ENepa PGabbrielli RPirozzi M(2025)Review on Systems Combining Computer Vision and Radio Frequency IdentificationIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2024.348475512:2(1291-1319)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2024.3484755
Iseda HYasumoto KUchiyama AHigashino T(2024)Daily Living Activity Recognition with Frequency-Shift WiFi Backscatter TagsSensors10.3390/s2411327724:11(3277)Online publication date: 21-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/s24113277
Zheng JChen THe JWang ZGao B(2024)Review on Security Range Perception Methods and Path-Planning Techniques for Substation Mobile RobotsEnergies10.3390/en1716410617:16(4106)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/en17164106
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Towards Wearable Everyday Body-Frame Tracking using Passive RFIDs
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Interaction techniques
      1. Gestural input
  2. Ubiquitous and mobile computing
    1. Ubiquitous and mobile devices
      1. Mobile devices

Recommendations

RF-Wear: Towards Wearable Everyday Skeleton Tracking Using Passive RFIDs
UbiComp '18: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Joint Conference and 2018 International Symposium on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Wearable Computers

We introduce RF-Wear1, a low-cost, washable and wearable solution to track movements of a user's body using passive RFIDs embedded in their clothing. RF-Wear processes wireless signals reflected off these tags to a compact single-antenna RFID reader in ...
Human Body Parts Tracking Using Torso Tracking: Applications to Activity Recognition
ITNG '12: Proceedings of the 2012 Ninth International Conference on Information Technology - New Generations

This paper proposed an approach for human body part tracking which is based on torso tracking. The main goal in this paper is tracking main human body parts such as torso, head and hands. In the proposed method for human body part tracking, we are using ...
Secret-sharing based secure communication protocols for passive RFIDs
GLOBECOM'09: Proceedings of the 28th IEEE conference on Global telecommunications

With increase in applicability of RFID technology, there is ever growing demand for security. The popularity of RFID applicability lies in its ability for automatic identification and low-cost of RFID tags. Most of the recent security protocols for RFID ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies Volume 1, Issue 4

December 2017

1298 pages

EISSN:2474-9567

DOI:10.1145/3178157

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 January 2018

Accepted: 01 October 2017

Revised: 01 August 2017

Received: 01 May 2017

Published in IMWUT Volume 1, Issue 4

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

60
Total Citations
View Citations
783
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)83
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)10

Reflects downloads up to 03 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Tavanti ENepa PGabbrielli RPirozzi M(2025)Review on Systems Combining Computer Vision and Radio Frequency IdentificationIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2024.348475512:2(1291-1319)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2024.3484755
Iseda HYasumoto KUchiyama AHigashino T(2024)Daily Living Activity Recognition with Frequency-Shift WiFi Backscatter TagsSensors10.3390/s2411327724:11(3277)Online publication date: 21-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/s24113277
Zheng JChen THe JWang ZGao B(2024)Review on Security Range Perception Methods and Path-Planning Techniques for Substation Mobile RobotsEnergies10.3390/en1716410617:16(4106)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/en17164106
Ray LZhou BSuh SLukowicz P(2024)A comprehensive evaluation of marker-based, markerless methods for loose garment scenarios in varying camera configurationsFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2024.13799256Online publication date: 5-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2024.1379925
Xu VGao CHoffmann HAhuja K(2024)MobilePoser: Real-Time Full-Body Pose Estimation and 3D Human Translation from IMUs in Mobile Consumer DevicesProceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3654777.3676461(1-11)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3654777.3676461
Xie MJin MZhu FZhang YTian XWang XZhou CGanesan DShi W(2024)Enabling High-rate Backscatter Sensing at ScaleProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3649351(124-138)Online publication date: 29-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3636534.3649351
Cheng WChan L(2024)BodyTouchProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36314267:4(1-22)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3631426
Liu JXia ZLiu JGuo S(2024)RF-Care: RFID-Based Human Pose Estimation for Nursing-Care Applications Under Visual OcclusionIEEE Sensors Journal10.1109/JSEN.2024.340796224:21(35359-35366)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/JSEN.2024.3407962
Iseda HYasumoto KUchiyama AHigashino T(2024)Feasibility of Living Activity Recognition with Frequency-Shift WiFi Backscatter Tags in Homes2024 International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE)10.1109/IE61493.2024.10599916(9-16)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/IE61493.2024.10599916
Ray LZhou BSuh SLukowicz P(2023)Selecting the Motion Ground Truth for Loose-fitting Wearables: Benchmarking Optical MoCap MethodsProceedings of the 2023 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers10.1145/3594738.3611359(27-32)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3594738.3611359
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents