Towards a battery-free wireless smart glove for rehabilitation applications based on RFID

Several studies have shown the effectiveness of recent rehabilitation technologies such as games, robots and data gloves to perform rehabilitation of several brain and physical deceases with motor and functional deficits as side effect. Specifically, special gloves equipped with sensors have been used as assessment technology in several stroke rehabilitation over the last two decades, however current commercial data gloves are typically expensive and have several disadvantages for rehabilitation applications, such as cables for computer interface and batteries for wireless communication. Cables generally disturb the movements and batteries increase their weight. Additionally, these data gloves are expensive and as a consequence the same device is shared by several patients. Moreover, they are not washable, thus they are not appropriate for clinical usage. This paper presents a new concept of data glove technology based on UHF RFID that is wireless, lightweight and battery-free. The proposed system can have several sensors and can be used for rehabilitation applications.