RFID-based Sensing and Reconstruction of Human Movements for Safety Monitoring of Workers

Wireless sensing and reconstruction of human movements is a crucial task also for monitoring of workers’ safety. For such a purpose, in this work, a UHF RFID tag integrated with an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensor has been designed so to exploit the low-power-consumption of RFID technology, and then realized and tested. It leverages on a specific RFID chip, the Impinj Monza X, provided with a wired memory access in addition to the classical wireless one. The working range is guaranteed by boosting the chip sensitivity through an on-board battery, also used to supply an ultra-low power microcontroller and the IMU. To test the device in a realistic environment, such as occupational setting, some prototypes have been simultaneously applied on harms and torso of a subject and the transmitted data used as input of a virtual human-body biomechanical model. The capability of the system of correctly reconstruct the human body movements validates the proposed approach.