RFID Based Non-Contact Human Activity Detection Exploiting Cross Polarization

This paper explores antenna's polarization for Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) based non-contact human activity detection. For the first time, a cross circular polarization configuration between reader antenna and tag antenna is proposed to increase the sensing range and spatial sensitivity. Compared to conventional RFID configurations - linearly polarized (LP) tag and circularly polarized (CP) reader, a cross CP configuration can improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) which leads to 230% increase in the detection area over traditional approach in our experiment. As the result of the improvement of spatial sensitivity, the proposed approach can detect subtle and small body movements at almost 4.5m from the reader, such as head movements or even respiration, which enables a low-cost, easy-to-use, non-contact and non-intrusive monitoring of the elderly and disabled peoples in places like hospitals and assisted living homes.