The trend is global; the worldwide population over age 65 will be
more than double from 357 million in 1990 to 761 million in 2025 [5]. Longevity has caused
expensive age-related disabilities, diseases, and therefore healthcare. To help in addressing
this aging population medication needs, we target our prototype on an in-home elder
healthcare system. This is a continuation of our work on applying wireless technologies for
biomedical applications [6??“8].
The rest of this section presents major features of the RFID technology. Related studies
on integration of RFID and sensor networks are described in Section 17.2. This is followed
by a presentation of the two phases of the prototype system, in Sections 17.3 and 17.4,
respectively. Section 17.5 discusses technical challenges and future improvements. Finally,
Section 17.6 concludes this chapter.
17.1.1 RFID
Since sensor network has been a familiar topic in academia, we skip its introduction and
focus only on RFID. An RFID system, more speci?¬?cally, includes three components: (1) a
tag or transponder located on the object to be identi?¬?ed, (2) an interrogator (reader) which
may be a read or write=read device, and (3) an antenna that emits radio signals to activate
the tag and read=write data to it.
At its simplest form, a tag is a beacon announcing its presence to a reader. These types of
tags are often seen in retail stores used to prevent theft by announcing their presence when
taken past a reader.
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