Life expectancy in most countries has been increasing continually over the several few decades thanks to significant improvements in medicine, public health, as well as personal and environmental hygiene. However, increased life expectancy combined with falling birth rates are expected to engender a large aging demographic in the near future that would impose significant burdens on the socio-economic structure of these countries. Therefore, it is essential to develop cost-effective, easy-to-use systems for the sake of elderly healthcare and well-being. Remote health monitoring, based on non-invasive and wearable sensors, actuators and modern communication and information technologies offers an efficient and cost-effective solution that allows the elderly to continue to live in their comfortable home environment instead of expensive healthcare facilities. These systems will also allow healthcare personnel to monitor important physiological signs of their patients in real time, assess health conditions and provide feedback from distant facilities. In this paper, we have presented and compared several low-cost and non-invasive health and activity monitoring systems that were reported in recent years. A survey on textile-based sensors that can potentially be used in wearable systems is also presented. Finally, compatibility of several communication technologies as well as future perspectives and research challenges in remote monitoring systems will be discussed.

Wearable Sensors for Remote Health Monitoring.

The performance and integration density of silicon integrated circuits (ICs) have progressed at an unprecedented pace in the past 60 years. While silicon ICs thrive at low-power high-performance computing, creating flexible and large-area electronics using silicon remains a challenge. On the other hand, flexible and printed electronics use intrinsically flexible materials and printing techniques to manufacture compliant and large-area electronics. Nonetheless, flexible electronics are not as efficient as silicon ICs for computation and signal communication. Flexible hybrid electronics (FHE) leverages the strengths of these two dissimilar technologies. It uses flexible and printed electronics where flexibility and scalability are required, i.e., for sensing and actuating, and silicon ICs for computation and communication purposes. Combining flexible electronics and silicon ICs yields a very powerful and versatile technology with a vast range of applications. Here, the fundamental building blocks of an FHE system, printed sensors and circuits, thinned silicon ICs, printed antennas, printed energy harvesting and storage modules, and printed displays, are discussed. Emerging application areas of FHE in wearable health, structural health, industrial, environmental, and agricultural sensing are reviewed. Overall, the recent progress, fabrication, application, and challenges, and an outlook, related to FHE are presented.

A New Frontier of Printed Electronics: Flexible Hybrid Electronics.

Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity, European Space Agency, is the first satellite mission addressing the challenge of measuring sea surface salinity from space It uses an L-band microwave interferometric radiometer with aperture synthesis (MIRAS) that generates brightness temperature images, from which both geophysical variables are computed The retrieval of salinity requires very demanding performances of the instrument in terms of calibration and stability This paper highlights the importance of ocean salinity for the Earth's water cycle and climate; provides a detailed description of the MIRAS instrument, its principles of operation, calibration, and image-reconstruction techniques; and presents the algorithmic approach implemented for the retrieval of salinity from MIRAS observations, as well as the expected accuracy of the obtained results

/pdf/smos-the-challenging-sea-surface-salinity-measurement-from-2f8hsysimx.pdf

SMOS: The Challenging Sea Surface Salinity Measurement From Space

IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters

In a few years, the world will be populated by billions of connected devices that will be placed in our homes, cities, vehicles, and industries. Devices with limited resources will interact with the surrounding environment and users. Many of these devices will be based on machine learning models to decode meaning and behavior behind sensors’ data, to implement accurate predictions and make decisions. The bottleneck will be the high level of connected things that could congest the network. Hence, the need to incorporate intelligence on end devices using machine learning algorithms. Deploying machine learning on such edge devices improves the network congestion by allowing computations to be performed close to the data sources. The aim of this work is to provide a review of the main techniques that guarantee the execution of machine learning models on hardware with low performances in the Internet of Things paradigm, paving the way to the Internet of Conscious Things. In this work, a detailed review on models, architecture, and requirements on solutions that implement edge machine learning on Internet of Things devices is presented, with the main goal to define the state of the art and envisioning development requirements. Furthermore, an example of edge machine learning implementation on a microcontroller will be provided, commonly regarded as the machine learning “Hello World”.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/9/2533/pdf

Edge Machine Learning for AI-Enabled IoT Devices: A Review

Ultra-wide Band (UWB) technology is a new, useful and safe technology in the fleld of wireless body networks. This paper focuses on the feasibility of estimating vital signs | speciflcally breathing rate and heartbeat frequency | from the spectrum of recorded waveforms, using an impulse-radio (IR) UWB radar. To this end, an analytical model is developed to perform and interpret the spectral analysis. Both the harmonics and the intermodulation between respiration and heart signals are addressed. Simulations have been performed to demonstrate how they afiect the detection of vital signs and also to analyze the in∞uence of the pulse waveform. A fllter to cancel out breathing harmonics is also proposed to improve heart rate detection. The results of the experiments are presented under difierent scenarios which demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed technique for determining respiration and heartbeat rates. It has been shown that an IR-UWB radar can meet the requirements of typical biomedical applications such as non-invasive heart and respiration rate monitoring.

/pdf/analysis-of-vital-signs-monitoring-using-an-ir-uwb-radar-3dvli0yol5.pdf

Analysis of vital signs monitoring using an ir-uwb radar

Sea surface salinity can be measured by microwave radiometry at L-band (1400-1427 MHz). This frequency is a compromise between sensitivity to the salinity, small atmospheric perturbation, and reasonable pixel resolution. The description of the ocean emission depends on two main factors: (1) the sea water permittivity, which is a function of salinity, temperature, and frequency, and (2) the sea surface state, which depends on the wind-induced wave spectrum, swell, and rain-induced roughness spectrum, and by the foam coverage and its emissivity. This study presents a simplified two-layer emission model for foam-covered water and the results of a controlled experiment to measure the foam emissivity as a function of salinity, foam thickness, incidence angle, and polarization. Experimental results are presented, and then compared to the two-layer foam emission model with the measured foam parameters used as input model parameters. At 37 psu salt water the foam-induced emissivity increase is /spl sim/0.007 per millimeter of foam thickness (extrapolated to nadir), increasing with increasing incidence angles at vertical polarization, and decreasing with increasing incidence angles at horizontal polarization.

/pdf/the-emissivity-of-foam-covered-water-surface-at-l-band-38tx80l249.pdf

The emissivity of foam-covered water surface at L-band: theoretical modeling and experimental results from the FROG 2003 field experiment

In this article, an overview of recent advances in the field of battery-less near-field communication (NFC) sensors is provided, along with a brief comparison of other short-range radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies. After reviewing power transfer using NFC, recommendations are made for the practical design of NFC-based tags and NFC readers. A list of commercial NFC integrated circuits with energy-harvesting capabilities is also provided. Finally, a survey of the state of the art in NFC-based sensors is presented, which demonstrates that a wide range of sensors (both chemical and physical) can be used with this technology. Particular interest arose in wearable sensors and cold-chain traceability applications. The availability of low-cost devices and the incorporation of NFC readers into most current mobile phones make NFC technology key to the development of green Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

A Survey of NFC Sensors Based on Energy Harvesting for IoT Applications

The Radio Frequency Identiflcation (RFID) applications are growing rapidly, especially in the UHF frequency band that is being used in inventory management. Passive UHF tags are preferred for these applications. In this paper, RFID reader-to-reader interference is analyzed. A model to estimate the minimum distance between readers to achieve a desired probability of detection in real multipath environments is derived and compared to the ideal case (AWGN channel). Diversity techniques to combat multipath and interference efiects are proposed and studied.

/pdf/effects-of-interferences-in-uhf-rfid-systems-16lv5le7vw.pdf

Effects of interferences in uhf rfid systems

Chipless ultra-wideband (UWB) has been proposed as a low-cost alternative for radiofrequency identiflcation (RFID). In this paper, a comprehensible theoretical introduction to time-domain operation of a UWB RFID tag is described, and a circuit model is proposed. For commercial applications low-cost RFID readers are demanded. To this end, this paper addresses the measurement of time-coded UWB chipless tags for RFID in time domain. Two difierent setups to detect time-coded tags are presented, one based on commercial UWB impulse radar (IR) and the other based on a vector network analyzer (VNA). The experimental results show the feasibility of using an IR-UWB radar as a UWB RFID reader, achieving very good read ranges.

/pdf/time-domain-measurement-of-time-coded-uwb-chipless-rfid-tags-3bleiue2bt.pdf

Ramon Villarino

Papers

Analysis of vital signs monitoring using an ir-uwb radar

The emissivity of foam-covered water surface at L-band: theoretical modeling and experimental results from the FROG 2003 field experiment

A Survey of NFC Sensors Based on Energy Harvesting for IoT Applications

Effects of interferences in uhf rfid systems

Time-Domain Measurement of Time-Coded UWB Chipless RFID Tags