A portable RFID reader augmented with tracking capabilities for indoor monitoring of people

With the accelerated ageing of the world population, progressively more people suffer from age-related illnesses and have the necessity to be monitored and assisted continually in the hospitals, in nursing homes or even better at home. It's demonstrated that the investigation of elderly patients' habits and movements can achieve an early detection of many disorders such as Alzheimer's disease or senile dementia. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of a 2.45 GHz microwave system, with the capabilities of an RFID reader exploited for an agile and accurate beam-steering to efficiently detect tagged people or objects, standing or moving in an harsh electromagnetic environment. This reader, called RID (acronym of Remotely Identify and Detect) has the ability to detect the angular position of the active tags in an indoor environment and gives an estimation of the distance from the reader with agreeable accuracy.