RFID Shakables: Pairing Radio-Frequency Identification Tags with the Help of Gesture Recognition

A novel approach for pairing RFID-enabled devices is introduced and evaluated in this work. Two or more devices are moved simultaneously through the radio field in close proximity of one or more RFID readers. Gesture recognition is applied to identify the movements of the devices, to mark them as a pair. This application is of interest for social networks and game applications in which play patterns with RFID-enabled toys are used to establish virtual friendships. In wireless networking, it can be used for user-friendly association of devices. The approach introduced here works with off-the-shelf passive RFID tags, as it is software-based and does not require hardware or protocol modifications. Every RFID reader constantly seeks for tags, thus, as soon as one tag is in its vicinity, the reader reports the presence of the tag. Such binary information is used to recognize the movement of tags and to pair them, if the gesture patterns match each other. We show via experimental evaluation that this feature can be easily implemented. We determine the required gesture interval duration and characteristics for accurate gesture and matching detection.