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Thermotag: item-level temperature sensing with a passive RFID tag

Published: 24 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Temperature sensing plays a significant role in upholding quality assurance and meeting regulatory compliance in a wide variety of applications, such as fire safety and cold chain monitoring. However, existing temperature measurement devices are bulky, cost-prohibitive, or battery-powered, making item-level sensing and intelligence costly. In this paper, we present a novel tag-based thermometer called Thermotag, which uses a common passive RFID tag to sense the temperature with competitive advantages of being low-cost, battery-free, and robust to environmental conditions. The basic idea of Thermotag is that the resistance of a semiconductor diode in a tag's chip is temperature-sensitive. By measuring the discharging period through the reverse-polarized diode, we can estimate the temperature indirectly. We propose a standards-compliant measurement scheme of the discharging period by using a tag's volatile memory and build a mapping model between the discharging period and temperature for accurate and reliable temperature sensing. We implement Thermotag using a commercial off-the-shelf RFID system, with no need for any firmware or hardware modifications. Extensive experiments show that the temperature measurement has a large span ranging from 0 °C to 85 °C and a mean error of 2.7 °C.

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  • (2024)ZenseTag: An RFID assisted Twin-Tag Single Antenna COTS Sensor InterfaceProceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems10.1145/3666025.3699342(336-350)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
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  • (2024)ZenseTag: An RFID assisted Twin-Tag Single Antenna COTS Sensor InterfaceProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3698850(1757-1759)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MobiSys '21: Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
    June 2021
    528 pages
    ISBN:9781450384438
    DOI:10.1145/3458864
    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 ACM 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]

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    Published: 24 June 2021

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    1. passive RFID
    2. persistence time
    3. temperature sensing

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    MobiSys '21 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 166 submissions, 22%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 274 of 1,679 submissions, 16%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)ZenseTag: An RFID assisted Twin-Tag Single Antenna COTS Sensor InterfaceProceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems10.1145/3666025.3699342(336-350)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
    • (2024)Spray: A Spectrum-efficient and Agile Concurrent Backscatter SystemACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/363805120:2(1-21)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2024
    • (2024)ZenseTag: An RFID assisted Twin-Tag Single Antenna COTS Sensor InterfaceProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3698850(1757-1759)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
    • (2024)Design of A Flexible RFID Tag Antenna with High Tolerance in Bending States2024 IEEE 10th International Symposium on Microwave, Antenna, Propagation and EMC Technologies for Wireless Communications (MAPE)10.1109/MAPE62875.2024.10813661(1-4)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2024
    • (2024)Information Fusion-Based Temperature Sensing With Passive UHF RFID TagsIEEE Sensors Letters10.1109/LSENS.2024.34216748:10(1-4)Online publication date: Oct-2024
    • (2024)TagSense: Robust Wheat Moisture and Temperature Sensing Using RFIDIEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification10.1109/JRFID.2024.33898688(76-87)Online publication date: 2024
    • (2023)Body Temperature Related Risk Factor Assessment Using RFID Sensor TagsRFID Sensör Etiketleri Kullanarak Vücut Sıcaklığı İle İlgili Risk Faktörü DeğerlendirmesiÇukurova Üniversitesi Mühendislik Fakültesi Dergisi10.21605/cukurovaumfd.133419138:2(585-592)Online publication date: 28-Jul-2023
    • (2023)ForceStickerProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35807937:1(1-32)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2023
    • (2023)RFID Tags as Passive Temperature Sensors2023 IEEE International Conference on RFID (RFID)10.1109/RFID58307.2023.10178523(48-53)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2023
    • (2023)RSSI Fluctuation Analysis for RFID Tagged and Untagged Liquid Object2023 4th International Conference on Information Science, Parallel and Distributed Systems (ISPDS)10.1109/ISPDS58840.2023.10235597(662-665)Online publication date: 14-Jul-2023
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