Low-cost and flexible radio frequency identification (RFID) tag for automatic identification, tracking, and monitoring of blood products is in great demand by the healthcare industry. A robust performance to meet security and traceability requirements in the different blood sample collection and analysis centers is also required. In this paper, a novel low-cost and flexible passive RFID tag is presented for blood sample collection tubes. The tag antenna is based on two compact symmetrical capacitive structures and works at the ultra-high frequency (UHF) European band (865 MHz-868 MHz). The tag antenna is designed considering the whole dielectric parameters such as the blood, substrate and tube. In this way, it operates efficiently in the presence of blood, which has high dielectric permittivity and loss. Measurement results of the proposed tag have confirmed simulation results. The measured performance of the tag shows good matching in the desired frequency band, leading to reading ranges up to 2.2 m, which is 4.4 times higher than typical commercial tags. The potential of this tag as a sensor to monitor the amount of blood contained in clinic tubes is also demonstrated. It is expected that the proposed tag can be useful and effective in future RFID systems to introduce security and traceability in different blood sample collection and analysis centers.
Keywords: antenna; blood tracking; healthcare; passive sensor; radio frequency identification (RFID).