Near Field Communication Tags Research Articles

Attendance Data Collection Using NFC Tags

In the field of contemporary wireless technology, near-field communication (NFC) stands out as an important force, enabling contactless transactions and the seamless exchange of information between electronic devices. This research explores the innovative integration of NFC into the attendance input process, which is linked to a website-based attendance system. NFC's adaptability, which was initially prominent in payment cards, has expanded across industries, empowering smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices. This study contributes to the ongoing development of NFC technology, proposing a renewable solution for student attendance systems. With a vision of increased efficiency, this research anticipates increased utilization of time and resources, thereby providing a promising path for the advancement of attendance management. Attendance tracking is a critical aspect of educational and organizational management, with traditional methods often plagued by inefficiencies and inaccuracies. This research explores the implementation of Near Field Communication (NFC) tags as a modern solution for attendance data collection. The study aims to assess the effectiveness of NFC technology in improving accuracy, efficiency, and real-time access to attendance information. The research employed a mixed-methods approach, incorporating a pilot study in an educational setting. NFC tags were distributed to participants, allowing for contactless attendance registration. Data was collected through observations, user feedback, and system logs. Additionally, a comparative analysis was conducted between NFC-based attendance tracking and traditional methods. Findings indicate a substantial improvement in accuracy and efficiency with NFC tags compared to traditional methods. Real-time data access provided administrators with up-to-the-minute attendance information, enabling timely interventions and streamlined record-keeping. User feedback highlighted the ease of use and convenience of the NFC-based system.

An NFC application for the process mapping automation for SMEs

In the past decade, the focus on Process Reengineering (PR) and innovation management has driven enterprises to explore how new technologies can reshape their business models and redefine their operational processes. Business Process Management, the visual display of physical process and IT flow, provide a structured approach to understanding, analyzing, and improving business processes, leading to increased efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction. While small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a vital role in manufacturing economies, their limited technical and financial resources often hinder substantial investments in research and development (R&D). This research aims to address this challenge by providing SMEs with an affordable and user-friendly solution for automating business process mapping, calculating total process times, and determining phase durations without the need for external expertise. Through the utilization of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, a comprehensive toolkit consisting of IoT devices with NFC tags has been developed. This toolkit can be seamlessly integrated into the local area network of the company. Rigorous testing in a laboratory environment has demonstrated the solution effectiveness and its seamless integration into the production environment of SMEs. By empowering SMEs with this cost-effective solution, they can gain valuable insights of their processes. Furthermore, by facilitating the easy and rapid development of their own business process mapping, SMEs have the potential to pave the way for effective and efficient reengineering. This research bridges the gap between limited resources and the growing demand for technological and organizational innovation, as well as cost savings in SMEs. It offers a practical and accessible approach to enhancing productivity and competitiveness in the ever-evolving business landscape.

Durable and sustainable smart tags for identity management and condition monitoring: Case study for reusable packaging and recyclable data carriers

AbstractReusable packaging has been used as a case study for development of durable and sustainable smart tags that can provide both identity management and potentially also condition monitoring capabilities. Four different smart tag technologies have been investigated, including laser engraved 2D bar codes, printed 2D bar codes with combined temperature indicator, printed NFC (Near‐Field Communication) tags and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags as labels. All technologies showed excellent durability towards repeated washing and heating when protective layers were used. SWOT analysis was also carried out to weight the advantages and disadvantages of the different technologies summarizing the choice of the technology per use and end‐of‐life requirements. Sustainability of the investigated technologies is discussed from the smart tag recyclability perspective and the challenges that can be seen related to the use of electronic functionalities and/or plastic‐based protective layers.

PDMS-metal oxide nanocomposites as transparent encapsulants for flexible electronic devices

Encapsulation is integral to electronic devices for maintaining long-term functionality and stability. While a variety of materials and solutions are available for conventional silicon-based electronics, not all of them are suitable for flexible optoelectronic devices. Typically, these devices require materials with low processing temperature, while maintaining both the optical and electrical functionality. Simple deposition and low cost are added advantages. In this work, we show that pure polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), and its composites with metal oxide nanoparticles such as zinc oxide (ZnO) and titanium dioxide (TiO2) are suitable encapsulants for flexible electronics. These coatings are electrically and thermally insulating, optically transparent (controllable by the amount of metal oxides), hydrophobic (contact angle 114∘), and offer good environmental protection. The coatings can be prepared by a simple spin coating process and annealed at temperatures less than 150 ∘C. The performance of pure PDMS and PDMS-metal oxides were evaluated using different characterisation techniques. These coatings were also tested on printed silver nanowire patterns and commercial flexible NFC (near field communication) tags. The addition of up to 2 wt.% ZnO and TiO2 nanoparticles was found to improve the properties of PDMS, improving the environmental protection (showing a Bode impedance of the order of 10-), without significantly affecting the optical transparency (73% transmittance).

Recent Advances in Batteryless NFC Sensors for Chemical Sensing and Biosensing.

This article reviews the recent advances in the field of batteryless near-field communication (NFC) sensors for chemical sensing and biosensing. The commercial availability of low-cost commercial NFC integrated circuits (ICs) and their massive integration in smartphones, used as readers and cloud interfaces, have aroused great interest in new batteryless NFC sensors. The fact that coil antennas are not importantly affected by the body compared with other wireless sensors based on far-field communications makes this technology suitable for future wearable point-of-care testing (PoCT) devices. This review first compares energy harvesting based on NFC to other energy-harvesting technologies. Next, some practical recommendations for designing and tuning NFC-based tags are described. Power transfer is key because in most cases, the energy harvested has to be stable for several seconds and not contaminated by undesired signals. For this reason, the effect of the dimensions of the coils and the conductivity on the wireless power transfer is thoroughly discussed. In the last part of the review, the state of the art in NFC-based chemical and biosensors is presented. NFC-based tags (or sensor tags) are mainly based on commercial or custom NFC ICs, which are used to harvest the energy from the RF field generated by the smartphone to power the electronics. Low-consumption colorimeters and potentiostats can be integrated into these NFC tags, opening the door to the integration of chemical sensors and biosensors, which can be harvested and read from a smartphone. The smartphone is also used to upload the acquired information to the cloud to facilitate the internet of medical things (IoMT) paradigm. Finally, several chipless sensors recently proposed in the literature as a low-cost alternative for chemical applications are discussed.

Analysis of Flexible Silver-printed NFC Tag Antenna on Miniaturization and Bending Effect

Size and flexibility are the two main elements that must be considered in designing a near-field communication (NFC) tag antenna because they will determine the performance of the whole system. The previously designed NFC tag antenna, which is made of a rigid substrate such as FR-4, limited the application of the tag to only on a flat surface. The size of the tag antenna also needs to be optimised based on the application requirements since different sizes of the antenna will contribute to different electrical properties, including inductance and resistance. Therefore, this paper presents an analysis of a flexible printed tag antenna with different miniaturisation sizes and bending effects for NFC systems. The operating frequency of the proposed NFC tag antenna is 13.56 MHz, which is the same frequency as the NFC reader, allowing them to be coupled and to communicate with each other. Three sizes of silver printed tag antenna are presented, and the performance of the tag during bending is analyzed. Other tag antenna parameters and characteristics, including reflection coefficient, inductance, resistance, read range and output voltage, are also observed through simulation and accordingly measured. The results show that the Design 1 antenna has demonstrated the highest measured tag reading range of 3 cm, while the Design 2 antenna has shown good flexibility, withstanding bending at various angles and exhibiting a minimum reading range of 0.5 cm. Overall, the correlation between antenna size, flexibility and antenna performance has been determined and systematically validated.

Near-Field Communication Tag for Colorimetric Glutathione Determination with a Paper-Based Microfluidic Device

Here, we propose a microfluidic paper-based analytical device (µPAD) implemented with a near-field communication (NFC) tag as a portable, simple and fast colorimetric method for glutathione (GSH) determination. The proposed method was based on the fact that Ag+ could oxidize 3,3',5,5'-tetramethylbenzidine (TMB) into oxidized blue TMB. Thus, the presence of GSH could cause the reduction of oxidized TMB, which resulted in a blue color fading. Based on this finding, we developed a method for the colorimetric determination of GSH using a smartphone. A µPAD implemented with the NFC tag allowed the harvesting of energy from a smartphone to activate the LED that allows the capture of a photograph of the µPAD by the smartphone. The integration between electronic interfaces into the hardware of digital image capture served as a means for quantitation. Importantly, this new method shows a low detection limit of 1.0 µM. Therefore, the most important features of this non-enzymatic method are high sensitivity and a simple, fast, portable and low-cost determination of GSH in just 20 min using a colorimetric signal.

Deep-Learning-Aided RF Fingerprinting for NFC Relay Attack Detection

Near field communication (NFC) has been a widely used radiofrequency identification (RFID) technology, credited to its convenience and security features. However, the transmitted signals can be easily eavesdropped or relayed in an open wireless channel. One of the challenges is relay attack, where an attacker simply relays the signal and bypasses encryption or other means in the application layer. Prior works on relay attack countermeasures have focused on distance-bounding protocols or ambient-based solutions. This paper focuses on ISO/IEC 14443-A and proposes an NFC relay detection method based on RF fingerprinting of transmitted wireless signals in the physical layer. To this end, we first designed and implemented two realizations of NFC relay attacks, wired and wireless relays, and built an SDR-based testbed. We collected the normal and relayed signals of four NFC tags, and the answer to request type A (ATQA) segments were selected for RF fingerprinting. The created dataset comprised 66,366 samples, with four tags’ normal and wired relayed signals and the wireless relayed signals. The dataset was then fed into a deep CNN for training. Finally, our experiment results showed that the method effectively distinguished normal and relayed signals with a high accuracy of 99%, confirming that RF fingerprinting can be a promising countermeasure to NFC relay attacks.

Highly Sensitive and Ultra-Responsive Humidity Sensors Based on Graphene Oxide Active Layers and High Surface Area Laser-Induced Graphene Electrodes.

Ultra-sensitive and responsive humidity sensors were fabricated by deposition of graphene oxide (GO) on laser-induced graphene (LIG) electrodes fabricated by a low-cost visible laser scribing tool. The effects of GO layer thickness and electrode geometry were investigated. Sensors comprising 0.33 mg/mL GO drop-deposited on spiral LIG electrodes exhibited high sensitivity up to 1800 pF/% RH at 22 °C, which is higher than previously reported LIG/GO sensors. The high performance was ascribed to the high density of the hydroxyl groups of GO, promoted by post-synthesis sonication treatment, resulting in high water physisorption rates. As a result, the sensors also displayed good stability and short response/recovery times across a wide tested range of 0–97% RH. The fabricated sensors were benchmarked against commercial humidity sensors and displayed comparable performance and stability. Finally, the sensors were integrated with a near-field communication tag to function as a wireless, battery-less humidity sensor platform for easy read-out of environmental humidity values using smartphones.

Glucose-to-Resistor Transduction Integrated into a Radio-Frequency Antenna for Chip-less and Battery-less Wireless Sensing.

To maximize the potential of 5G infrastructure in healthcare, simple integration of biosensors with wireless tag antennas would be beneficial. This work introduces novel glucose-to-resistor transduction, which enables simple, wireless biosensor design. The biosensor was realized on a near-field communication tag antenna, where a sensing bioanode generated electrical current and electroreduced a nonconducting antenna material into an excellent conductor. For this, a part of the antenna was replaced by a Ag nanoparticle layer oxidized to high-resistance AgCl. The bioanode was based on Au nanoparticle-wired glucose dehydrogenase (GDH). The exposure of the cathode-bioanode to glucose solution resulted in GDH-catalyzed oxidation of glucose at the bioanode with a concomitant reduction of AgCl to highly conducting Ag on the cathode. The AgCl-to-Ag conversion strongly affected the impedance of the antenna circuit, allowing wireless detection of glucose. Mimicking the final application, the proposed wireless biosensor was ultimately evaluated through the measurement of glucose in whole blood, showing good agreement with the values obtained with a commercially available glucometer. This work, for the first time, demonstrates that making a part of the antenna from the AgCl layer allows achieving simple, chip-less, and battery-less wireless sensing of enzyme-catalyzed reduction reaction.

AUTHENTICATION OF HALAL FOOD AND BEVERAGE PRODUCTS CERTIFIED BY BPOM AND LPPOM-MUI BASED ON NFC SMARTPHONE

In meeting the need for healthy food and drinks that have been verified as halal, the government has established BPOM (Food and Drug Supervisory Agency) and LPPOM MUI (Institute for the Assessment of Food, Drugs, Cosmetics, Indonesian Ulama Council) so that food products circulating are continuously monitored and halal maintained. Food and beverage products must be verified and rigorously tested by the two institutions, so that these food and beverage products can be labeled as halal and healthy. However, some foods and drinks that have not been verified as halal and healthy are still circulating among the public. To make it easier for the public and sellers of food and beverage products, they need a system that can see directly the food products that they are going to buy have been verified as halal and healthy. This research designs a system which can be used as input for practical and easy solutions in verifying halal products using NFC (Near-field communication). NFC is one of the smartphone features that has been widely applied lately. The use of this features can directly attach a smartphone at a distance about 0-2 cm to the product to be purchased and has been integrated with an NFC tag and only takes approximately 1-2 seconds to find out the product information from a smartphone that connected to the internet through the BPOM and LPPOM MUI websites.

A Wearable NFC Antenna Sewn on Leather Substrate for Immersive IoT Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) is considered a promising realm of innovation and revenue generation for the forthcoming years, revolutionizing the way we interact with objects, other people and the world. With an unprecedented but realistic target of trillions of interconnected devices, the IoT calls for technological innovations that lie in the heart of rapid, low-energy and user-friendly communication between people and things. In this respect, the Near Field Communication (NFC) protocol offers advanced efficiency and applicability with low energy consumption, ease of use, flexibility, and increased payload. NFC tags may be embedded in everyday objects, including clothing and apparel, offering an immersive user experience. Wearable NFC antennas and NFC tags embedded in clothing have been presented in the past; nonetheless, in this paper we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first reported development of a NFC antenna on leather substrate. The proposed antenna is sewn using stainless steel thread and operates at the 13.56 MHz frequency range. It may be used alongside with NFC tags in leather apparel like clothing, shoes, accessories, etc., thus extending the possible use cases and applications of the NFC technology and offering an all the more immersive experience for the end user.

Flexible Strain and Temperature Sensing NFC Tag for Smart Food Packaging Applications

This paper presents a smart sensor patch with flexible strain sensor and a printed temperature sensor integrated with a Near Field Communication (NFC) tag to detect strain or temperature in a semi-quantitative way. The strain sensor is fabricated using conductive polymer poly (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT: PSS) in a polymer Polydimethylsiloxane microchannel. The temperature sensor is fabricated by printing silver electrodes and PEDOT:PSS on a flexible polyvinyl chloride (PVC) substrate. A custom-developed battery-less NFC tag with an LED indicator is used to visually detect the strain or temperature by modulating the LED light intensity. The LED shows maximum brightness for relaxed or no strain condition, and also in the case of maximum temperature. In contrast, the LED is virtually off for the maximum strain condition and for room temperature. Both these could be related to food spoilage. Swollen food packages can be detected with the strain sensor, serving as beacons of microbial contamination. Temperature deviations can result in the growth or survival of food-spoilage bacteria. Based on this, the potential application of the sensor system for smart food packaging is presented.

Electrical gas sensors for meat freshness assessment and quality monitoring: A review

The simple methods for Freshness assessment have been gained attention in the last years, mainly in case of highly perishable food products as those delivered by the meat sector . Furthermore, the growing demand for fresh and safe food makes the development of reliable, low-cost and time-saving methods for freshness investigation an important need. In this context, gas sensors represent a valuable tool to food freshness and quality monitoring , avoiding the supply and consumption of rotten meat products, which may be associated with foodborne diseases. The present work gives an overview of the existing gas sensors applied to meat quality monitoring, with emphasis on a particular class of gas sensors, the electrical gas sensors . This type of sensors has been shown to have a promissory interface with wireless technologies, such as the existing NFC (near field communication) and RFID (radio frequency identification) sensor tags, which may lead to meat quality and safety assurance at consumers’ level. The presented literature studies demonstrated that the electrical properties of different materials have been exploited for the development of gas sensors. The implementation of electrical gas sensors interfaced with wireless is a promising technology in the near future because of the possibility of a rapid and accessible meat quality monitoring. • Recent gas sensors applications and prospects for meat quality are reviewed. • Gas sensors for meat monitoring were summarized based on the transduction principle. • Electrical gas sensor (EGS) versatility in meat quality and freshness assessment. • EGS combined with wireless technologies has great potential for meat monitoring.

Check-In Location System Using NFC Technology

In COVID 19 pandemic, new norms have been introduced, including, to leave a record when checking-in to a particular place. This new norm is regulated in order to trace locations that have been visited by someone with positive COVID-19. This paper presents a work on development of check-in location system. The system implemented Near Field Communication (NFC) technology which is mainly utilized two NFC compatible devices where an identification card (IC) is used as a smart object (NFC tag) and the NFC detector as an NFC reader to exchange information. Testing has been conducted in order to observe the system performance, and, the results showed that this system is able to collect information of users who were coming to premise. Also, the information can be checked by authority in order to track someone with positive COVID-19. As conclusion, this system can be an alternative to MySejahtera App.

Pandemic tele-smart: a contactless tele-health system for efficient monitoring of remotely located COVID-19 quarantine wards in India using near-field communication and natural language processing system.

Efficient remote monitoring of the patient infected with coronavirus without spread to healthcare workers is the need of the hour. An effectual and faster communication system must be established wherein the healthcare workers at the remote quarantine ward can communicate with healthcare professionals present in specialty hospitals. Incidentally, there is a need to establish a contactless smart cloud-based connection between a specialty hospital and quarantine wards during pandemic situation. This paper proposes an initial contactless web-based tele-health clinical decision support system that integrates near-field communication (NFC) tags and a smart cloud-based structuring tool that enables the quick diagnosis of patients with COVID-19 symptoms and monitors the remotely located quarantine wards during the recent pandemic. The proposed framework consists of three-stages: (i) contactless health parameter extraction from the patient using an NFC tag; (ii) converting medical report into digital text using optical character recognition algorithm and extracting values of relevant medical-parameters using natural language processing; and (iii) smart visualization of key medical parameters. The accuracy of the proposed system from NFC reader until analysis using a novel structuring algorithm deployed in the cloud is more than 94%. Several capabilities of the proposed web-based system were compared with similar systems and tested in an authentic mock clinical setup, and the physicians found that the system is reliable and user friendly.Graphical abstract Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11517-021-02456-1.

Sustainable roll-to-roll manufactured multi-layer smart label

Sustainability in electronics has a growing importance due to, e.g. increasing electronic waste, and global and European sustainability goals. Printing technologies and use of paper as a substrate enable manufacturing of sustainable electronic devices for emerging applications, such as the multi-layer anti-counterfeit label presented in this paper. This device consisted of electrochromic display (ECD) element, NFC (near field communication) tag and circuitry, all fully roll-to-roll (R2R) printed and assembled on plastic-free paper substrate, thus leading to a sustainable and recyclable device. Our setup uses harvested energy from HF field of a smartphone or reader, to switch an electrochromic display after rectification to prove authenticity of a product. Our novelty is in upscaling the manufacturing process to be fully printable and R2R processable in high-throughput conditions simulating industrial environment, i.e. in pilot scale. The printing workflow consisted of 11 R2R printed layers, all done in sufficient quality and registration. The printed antennas showed sheet resistance values of 32.9±1.9 mΩ/sq. The final yield was almost 1500 fully printed devices, and in R2R assembly over 1400 labels were integrated with 96.5% yield. All the assembled tags were readable with mobile phone NFC reader. The optical contrast (ΔE*) measured for the ECDs was over 15 for all the printed displays, a progressive switching time with a colour change visible in less than 5 s. The smart tag is ITO-free, plastic-free, fully printed in R2R and has a good stability over 50 cycles and reversible colour change from light to dark blue.

Development of English Learning System by Using NFC Tag

We innovate an educational toy to play the English learning system. The proposed system uses a Raspberry Pi and two Near Field Communication (NFC) readers. The user can learn English words in three steps by using our system. First, NFC tags are presented corresponding to English words and illustrations, such as a cat, dog and chicken etc. Next, a pair of tags is required to select corresponding to an English word and illustration. Finally, by holding the pair over the NFC reader, the answer is displayed on a touch panel to inform whether it is correct or incorrect. Our system has two aspects. The one is an educational system for children and the other is an educational toy playing with children. As to the former, the system helps the children as users can learn English words by intuitive operation such as operating the touch panel and holding the NFC tags. As to the latter, it offers a learning experience with the Information and Communication Technology (ICT). In this paper, we report findings through the construction of the English learning system.

Deep-Learning-Aided RF Fingerprinting for NFC Security

Given the ever increasing use of near field communication (NFC), the security of this system is becoming increasingly important. Recently, radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting, where the physical RF characteristics of a communication device are used as a means to provide guarantees of authenticity and security, has received serious consideration due to the uniqueness of these characteristics, making cloning difficult. In this article, we discuss the feasibility of RF fingerprinting assisted by deep learning for use in identifying NFC tags. To this end, we implement a hardware testbed with an off-the-shelf NFC reader and software defined radio. An RF signal corresponding to one-bit transmission from the NFC tag is used to extract the RF characteristics, which enables rapid identification. Three different types of deep neural network are used, namely fully connected layer-based neural network” convolutional neural network, and recurrent neural network. By exper-iment, we confirm that deep-learning-based algorithms can uniquely distinguish 50 NFC tags with up to 96.16 percent accuracy. We also discuss some of the key technical challenges involved in the use of deep-learning-based RF fingerprinting for NFC.

Smart Bandage With Wireless Strain and Temperature Sensors and Batteryless NFC Tag

This article presents a smart bandage with wireless strain and temperature sensors and a batteryless near-field communication (NFC) tag. Both sensors are based on conductive poly (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) polymer. The highly sensitive strain sensor consists of a microfluidic channel filled with PEDOT:PSS in Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate. The strain sensor shows 3 order ( <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">~</sub> 1250) increase in the resistance for 10% strain and considerably high gauge factor (GF) of <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">~</sub> 12 500. The sensor was tested for <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">~</sub> 30% strain, which is more than typical stretching of human skin or body parts such as chest expansion during respiration. The strain sensor was also tested for different bending and the electrical resolution was <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">~</sub> 150% per degree of free bending and <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">~</sub> 12k% per percentage of stretching. The resistive temperature sensor, fabricated on a Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) substrate, showed a <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">~</sub> 60% decrease in resistance when the temperature changed from 25 °C to 85 °C and a sensitivity of <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">~</sub> 1% per °C. As a proof of concept, the sensors and NFC tag were integrated on wound dressing to obtain wearable systems with smart bandage form factor. The sensors can be operated and read from distance of 25 mm with a user-friendly smartphone application developed for powering the system as well as real-time acquisition of sensors data. Finally, we demonstrate the potential use of smart bandage in healthcare applications such as assessment of wound status or respiratory diseases, such as asthma and COVID-19, where monitoring via wearable strain (e.g., respiratory volume) and temperature sensors is critical.