Design of a low cost RFID platform with added value sensing capabilities for humanitarian relief applications

The design of low cost identification systems with added value sensing capabilities is crucial for humanitarian relief applications such as telemedicine and remote health monitoring. This paper presents the design of a low cost RFID (radio frequency identification) platform which has the ability to collect sensor information using standard EPC (electronic product code) protocols and interfaces. In particular, the EPC low level reader protocol (LLRP) and the application level event (ALE) interfaces are modified to handle the sensor information collected by a mobile reader. The method considerably reduces implementation costs when compared to other solutions, as it consists of reusing an existing reader platform which initially has no sensing capabilities. This legacy reader is upgraded with two additional modules: one which provides an interface to collect sensor information (e.g., human body temperature), and another one that provides mobility by using wireless technologies (e.g., Bluetooth, WLAN or 3G). Furthermore, the platform uses open-source and royalty-free middleware components mainly developed within the European project ASPIRE that further reduce implementation costs. The platform can also be connected to a mobile terminal that can aggregate information of more than one reader and relay it to a centralized middleware location using a wireless connection. The approach used in this paper can be considered as an initial step towards the practical fusion of RFID and wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which is expected to play an important role in the Internet-of-things (IoT).