Vital Signs Monitoring with RFID: Opportunities and Challenges

Vital signs monitoring plays an important role in health assessing, especially for elderly healthcare. Traditional vital signs monitoring systems are intrusive. They require the users to wear or attach dedicated sensors and thus are inconvenient to use. Although recently developed contactless vital signs monitoring approaches (e.g., those based on WiFi sensing) become friendly, they cannot differentiate multiple target users. This article envisions the opportunity of utilizing the radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to perform accurate vital signs monitoring, which can combine the merit of contactless convenience as well as the advantage in distinguishing different users. We introduce the basic ideas of using RFID to perform vital signs monitoring and discuss the challenges to be addressed before the ideas can be put into practice. With commodity RFID devices, we implement a breath monitoring prototype that can accurately monitor the user's breath even when the user is moving. The prototype achieves over 97 percent accuracy in estimating breath rate and below 8 percent error in estimating individual breath length.