Education Column

Karl F. Warnick
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Brigham Young University
459 Clyde Building
Provo, UT 84602
Tel.: (801) 422-1732

RFID-based Smart Blood Stock System

Andela Zaric1, Catarina C. Cruz1, António M. de Matos2, Marta R. da Silva2,
Jorge R. Costa1,2, and Carlos A. Fernandes1
1
Instituto de Telecomunicações, Instituto Superior TécnicoVUniversidade de Lisboa (IST-UL),
1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal
E-mails: andela.zaric@lx.it.pt; katarinakruz@hotmail.com; jorge.costa@iscte.pt; carlos.fernandes@lx.it.pt
2
Departamento de Ciências e Tecnologias da Informação, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL),
1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal
E-mails: antoniompm91@gmail.com; martaraquel90@gmail.com

Abstract

A complete UHF radio-frequency identification (RFID)-based system capable of localizing individual blood bags in-
side storage cabinet drawers is presented. It was developed to demonstrate the improvement possibility of current
blood stock management systems and as the submission to the 2014 IEEE AP-S Student Design Contest: Antennas
for RFID Application. The system is composed of a cabinet model, a transceiver unit, and a PC with the controlling
software. A new implementation of pseudolocalization principle is used to localize the blood bags that are equipped
with dedicated passive tags designed to be resilient to blood proximity and small size. The detector antennas are
placed at the drawers bottoms and additional passive tags are utilized to identify individual locations in each drawer.
The transceiver unit is made from off-the-shelf commercial electronic boards and wirelessly controlled by software
run on the PC. The entire system is small, transportable, battery powered, and low cost.

Keywords: Radio-frequency identification (RFID) UHF antennas; RFID pseudolocalization; RFID tags for liquids; RFID
smart shelf

1. Introduction

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MAP.2015.2420491

T he work presented here was the winning finalist project
for 2014 IEEE AP-S Student Design Contest: Antennas
for radio-frequency identification (RFID) Application. Stu-
Date of publication: 13 May 2015 dent teams were challenged to be creative, to formulate, and

54 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 2, April 2015
to solve interesting antenna design problems by developing a with this blood management system around 14Q of identifi-
RFID system that is custom built for a specific application. cation errors occur in the blood bank and 86Q at bedside [6].
The system had to be safe and durable, easily reproducible,
inexpensive (total budget of /1500), and portable (for hand This kind of errors can be mitigated with a system
carry). The RFID system had to operate at UHF RFID band abundant with RFID tags to enable crosschecking the blood
902–928 MHz, limited to 4-W EIRP, with the reader pow- information and patient needs both in blood bank and at bed-
ered by a battery, the tags being batteryless (passive) and side. All necessary data can be stored in a single RFID chip,
limited to maximum size of 50 mm
50 mm
5 mm. Stu- and a single tag can be used for each blood bag. Therefore, a
dent versions of commonly used software (MATLAB, C, Smart Blood Stock System for blood collecting and storing
etc.) and free software packages were allowed to be used centers and hospitals was developed and presented here. The
along with a laptop PC that is not included in the budget presence and the location of the collected blood bags inside
limit. This paper is the full project report starting with the the cabinet is automatically detected and introduced into a da-
motivation for the chosen application scenario, and follow- tabase using double UHF RFID tag placement on the shelves
ing description of the developed system, localization method, and on the bags. The hospital personnel would use the cabi-
characterization of developed RFID antennas, developed net database to search for specific blood bag they need and
software, and at the end instructions on how to assemble and immediately get to know, in which location inside the cabinet
operate it. This paper is also accompanied by a demonstra- is the needed blood. Furthermore this system could be inte-
tion video of the system prepared for the semifinal phase of grated with a bedside RFID system that would enable auto-
the contest [1]. matic cross checking of the blood bags with the patient blood
type. The Smart Blood Stock System would help in ensuring
In the U.S., blood transfusion is needed every minute that the correct blood is administered more reliably and accu-
and around 30 million blood components are transfused each rately than common barcode-inventory systems.
year [2]. Around 60 fatalities per year happen due to errone-
ous blood transfusion [3], which calls for special attention to
diminishing transfusion errors, therefore, tracking the blood
from donor to patient [4]. Erroneous identification of the 2. System Overview
blood and/or the patient for transfusion is a serious life threat
that is currently managed by bar code tagging of blood bags The proposed solution for smart blood stock system
[5]. Each bag is tagged with various barcodes carrying spe- comprises three main parts: the cabinet unit, the transceiver
cific information about the blood as, for instance, the blood unit and the PC with a graphical user interface (GUI) devel-
type, collection date, expiry date, person that processed it in oped in student version of MATLAB, as shown in Figure 1a
each step, etc. When a blood bag is retrieved from the blood and b. The developed cabinet unit consists of two drawers
bank the barcodes are read manually to register that the bag (10 cm
30 cm), but in the general case, it can have from
was retrieved, and then, it is administered to the patient. Even just one to any number of drawers. Each of the drawers is

Figure 1. (a) Schematic and (b) photo of the RFID-based Smart Blood Stock System. Drawer with C-Tags in
(c) compartments and (d) blood bag with B-Tag.

IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 2, April 2015 55
divided into small compartments (6 cm in length) suited to dedicated reader antennas that have known spatially confined
hold one bag of blood each. The bottom of each drawer has radiation characteristics and are placed in a grid to cover the
a RFID reader antenna (Drawer Antenna) and each of the desired space without overlapping. This solution was pre-
small compartments is equipped with a dedicated tag (Com- sented in [11] featuring microstrip-based shelf reader anten-
partment Tag AntennaVC-Tag)VFigure 1c. Additionally, nas whose radiation pattern covers only the storage space
each of the blood bags carries another specialized tag (Blood above the shelf. This way, the reader detects each object
Bag Tag AntennaVB-Tag), which is very resistant to blood only by one reader antenna and knows on which shelf the
proximity [see Figure 1d]. The Drawer Antenna and the two object was placed.
types of tags will be presented in more detail in Section 4.
The transceiver unit is made by joining the following com- For the blood stock system presented here, a new im-
mercially available components: AS3992 UHF RFID reader plementation of the pseudolocalization principle is employed
[7], Arduino Mega ADK [8], HC-06 Bluetooth transceiver in order to not only be able to identify on which shelf is the
[9], and Lithium Mega Backpack [10]. The reader is able to object but also where on the shelf it is. This is accomplished
inventory various passive UHF RFID tags at the same time by using two types of tags, i.e., the first type of tags (C-Tags)
upon being prompted by an external control component, are used as known anchors on the shelf, and the second type
which here is the Arduino board. The Reader communicates (B-Tags) are the tags to be localized. More specifically, each
the tags electronic product code (EPC) to Arduino, which C-Tag is assigned to one of the drawer compartments in
then using the Bluetooth transceiver transmits the informa- the software’s internal database. When all of the C-Tags
tion to the PC, whereas the Lithium Mega Backpack is the are detected, it means that all of the compartments are
battery board that provides power for the entire transceiver empty (see Figure 2). On the other hand, when a blood bag
and makes it portable and viable for hand carry. Finally, the is placed on top of a C-Tag due to its design the blood
PC is used for user control of the system and for processing presence detunes the tag, and it is no longer read. In its
the data received from the transceiver unit. The hardware place, a B-Tag is read. This is how the location of the blood
components will be described in more detail in Section 5, bag is determined, whereas the “identity” of the blood bag is
and the software in Section 6. determined by the EPC of the B-tag attached to it. This is
graphically presented in Figure 2. It needs to be noted that a
new reading cycle has to be performed after each bag place-
ment, to avoid ambiguity in detection of the compartment, in
3. RFID Pseudolocalization Principle which each bag was placed.

Typical RFID application, such as warehouse and store

inventory or asset tracking, comprises a small number of
fixed readers, sometimes even only one, and a large number 4. Antenna Design, Simulation,
of tagged objects. The reader keeps track of the tags in its and Measurement
range by sending periodically an interrogation signal. When
the tags receive the signal each of them responds with its un- 4.1 Blood Bag Tag Antenna (B-Tag)
ique identification number (EPC). Therefore, only the tags
that receive sufficient energy to respond are in the reader’s The purpose of B-Tags is, as explained in Section 2, to
range. However, the reader, if equipped with one antenna, carry identification of each blood bag. The B-Tags are at-
only knows that the tag is present. Here, the pseudolocaliza- tached to blood bags and therefore have to be resilient to the
tion principle is used to determine the tag location since the negative liquid dielectric influence. This resilience is, in most
reader is capable of distinguishing which of the reader anten- cases, achieved by adding a ground plane to the tag. Hence,
nas is detecting the object. This is achieved by designing the proposed antenna configuration derives from two RFID

Figure 2. Pseudolocalization principle. The C-Tag determines the position (by not being detected)
and the B-Tag determines the “identity” of the bag. In the empty state, the C-Tag is detected
(a) and when a blood bag is placed in the compartment the corresponding C-Tag is no longer
detected, instead the bag B-Tag is as shown in (b).

56 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 2, April 2015
 Figure 3. Geometry of the B-Tag antenna. (a) Front. (b) Back. (c) Fabricated.

antenna designs comprising a ground plane [12, 13]. Both color since the dielectric properties of water and blood are very
these tags from the literature are tuned for the required UHF similar (around 80Q of blood is water). The water has just
RFID band (902–928 MHz), but dimensions (116 mm
slightly different relative permittivity 78 and almost equal
40 mm
1:8 mm and 85:5 mm
54 mm
1:6 mm) are far conductivity 1.59 S/m compared with blood.
from complying with the maximum required dimensions for
the contest (50 mm
50 mm
5 mm). Additionally, both of Instead of the classical s11 analysis, for RFID tag anten-
the antennas were designed for different RFID chips than the nas, it makes sense to analyze the power transfer function
ALIEN Higgs-3 IC [14], which will be used here. For the from the antenna to chip as this relates directly to the tag
ALIEN Higgs-3 IC, the manufacturer provides a lumped ele- achievable range. The power transfer function measures the
ment model, which is parallel between a 1500- resistor and maximum fraction of the available power at the antenna port
0.85-pF capacitor. It results in a chip impedance of Zchip ¼ that is transferred to the chip [16]. Both simulations, with
27:83  j199:15 @915 MHz. This means that the RFID and without the blood bag, are performed and the power
port must match the complex conjugate impedance of the transmission coefficients are shown in Figure 4 that were
chip to ensure maximum power transfer at 915 MHz. obtained using university-licensed CST software [17]. The
power transmission coefficient is higher for the blood bag
The geometry of the designed blood bag tag is presented presence, which is explained by the fact that the antenna is
in Figure 3. It is a planar antenna with a single metal layer designed and tuned considering the presence of the blood
printed on the front face [see Figure 3a] and a ground plane on bag. Power transmission is above 70Q level across the entire
the back face [see Figure 3b]. A FR-4 substrate with 3.6-mm required UHF band, which implies good detection as it is
thickness is used. In the front face two metallic patches with proved, experimentally, in the final competition video [1].
46 mm
22 mm are printed and each shortened to the ground
with 2 vias so that the vias are placed as close as possible to
the edge. The two metallic patches are separated by a gap of 4.2 Compartment Tag Antenna (C-Tag)
4 mm. The ALIEN Higgs-3 IC is soldered at gap middle. As
seen, the geometry of this antenna is inspired by both antennas The C-Tag antenna function in the blood stock system
in [12] and [13], and in comparison to [13], the simplification is to detect when a blood bag is placed in its compartment.
of design and introduction of second via at the end of each The proximity of dielectric such as blood is supposed to de-
patch along with the increase in substrate thickness has resulted tune the C-Tag and it would no longer be detected by the
in smaller dimensions that comply with contest requirements.
The manufactured antenna is shown in Figure 3c and the key
dimensions are given in Table 1.

To tune the B-Tag antenna impedance in the presence of

a blood bag on its back, the antenna was codesigned and ad-
justed with a blood bag of 200 mm
200 mm
30 mm, as in
the inset of Figure 4. Human blood has relative electrical per-
mittivity 61.31 and conductivity 1.54 S/m [15] and these values
are used for the blood block, however for the prototype system
the mock blood bags are made of water and water-soluble red

Table 1. Parameter values of the B-tag in millimeters.

Figure 4. Simulated Power Transmission Coefficient with
and without blood bag presence. (Inset) Schematic of the
B-Tag placed next to a blood bag. The vertical lines de-
note the used UHF RFID band (902–928 MHz).

IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 2, April 2015 57
RFID reader, this would signal the presence of the blood
bag. To achieve this, a classical RFID tag design is used, un-
like for the B-Tag. As presented in Figure 5a, the tag is a
planar antenna with a single metallic layer and comprises a
double loop and a meandered dipole. The design was based
on a previous UHF tag antenna designed by one of the
authors [18]. The tag is printed on one side of a FR-4 sub-
strate with 0.75-mm thickness, permittivity 4.3, and loss tangent
0.025. This antenna is also designed considering the input im-
pedance of the ALIEN Higgs-3 IC [14]. The RFID port im-
pedance must be ZRFID ¼ 27:83 þ j199:15 @915 MHz
and as a result of this, the antenna must exhibit inductive be-
havior, which is achieved using the double loop. The radiat- Figure 6. Simulated power transmission coefficient for
ing behavior is obtained with the addition of a dipole, which the proposed C-Tag with and without blood bag presence.
is meandered to reduce its length. To achieve the competi- (Inset) Schematic of the C-Tag antenna with a blood bag
tion requirements in terms of antenna maximum size, and si- on top. The vertical lines denote the used UHF RFID
multaneously produce an RFID tag working properly with band (902–928 MHz).
the referred chip, it was necessary to adjust loop and dipole
parameters of the original RFID antenna design in [18].
transmission is under 10Q for the UHF band (denoted with
Comparing the original antenna and the C-Tag presented
the gray shadowed area in Figure 6). This means that the
here, the main challenge was to resize the antenna structure
blood bag drastically detunes the antenna and, consequently,
while keeping the desired characteristics given that the origi-
the antenna does not adequately radiate; and therefore, it is
nal antenna was larger and had different chip impedance.
not detected by the RFID reader. This simulation behavior
was confirmed by experimental measurements, as demon-
The C-Tag’s final size is 50 mm
40 mm [the manu-
strated in the final competition video [1].
factured antenna is presented in Figure 5b] and the obtained
parameters values are given in Table 2.

Simulated power transmission coefficient for C-Tag 4.3 Drawer Antenna

without the blood bag is presented in Figure 6 (blue curve).
Power transmission is above 65Q level across the required The idea for the drawer antenna comes from previous
UHF band. A simulation was carried also to understand the work [11], where this kind of structure has proven useful in a
behavior of the C-Tag when a blood bag is positioned on top RFID application that required that a detector antenna would
of the tag. The corresponding power transmission coefficient only read the tags placed above a single shelf. If a classical
is shown in the inset of Figure 6 with the red dashed curve. high gain, therefore long range, detector antenna would be
As expected, and as required for this application, the power used in such scenario objects placed on the adjacent shelves

Figure 5. (a) Geometry of the C-Tag antenna. (b) Manufactured antenna with sol-
dered ALIEN Higgs-3 IC chip.

Table 2. Parameter values of the C-tag in millimeters.

58 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 2, April 2015
 Figure 7. Smart drawer antenna configuration. (a) Model. (b) Produced antenna
top view. (c) Produced antenna view of the feed.

would be falsely detected as present on the shelf in question. The main challenge in the antenna redesign comes from
The microstrip-based antenna in [11] has a limited energy the fact that this antenna has much smaller length than the
radiation in the plane perpendicular to the antenna plane, original one presented in [11]. Although the drawer antenna
which makes it ideal for applications comprising shelves used here is significantly smaller, it confines the radiation to
and/or drawers. The embedded microstrip line extends across the drawer structure as desired. Near-field energy distribution
the drawer length with full ground plane on the bottom side; for yz and xy planes is presented in Figure 8. The results
it is probe fed at one end, and terminated with a matched confirm, as could be expected, that the dominant electric
load (a 50- resistor) at the other end. field components are Ez and Ey . The Ex component is very
low, and it is not shown in Figure 8; instead the total field Et
The drawer antenna structure is presented in Figure 7a, is shown. It is noted that the fields are reasonably confined
where the transmission line is oriented along the x-axis to the drawer near zone and minimum energy needed for tag
throughout the entire length of the antenna. Its overall dimen- detection corresponds, in this figure, to 20 dBV/m.
sions are 100 mm
300 mm. To manufacture it, as shown in
Figure 7b and c, 0.5-cm-thick Styrofoam substrate layer is In yz plane component Ez has a null at the center of the
used, whose relative permittivity, close to 1, favors field leak- microstrip (y ¼ 0 mm) and radiation concentrated on the
age. The transmission line is centered on the ground plane and sides, whereas Ey is concentrated at the center. This is im-
its width is 27 mm in order to obtain a 50- impedance line. portant to have in mind when choosing the orientation of the
The structure is fed by 50- coaxial cable, via SMA coaxial B-Tag. Given that the B-Tags are linearly polarized in the di-
plug connector, and the line is terminated by a 50- load. An rection of the soldered chip (perpendicular to the longer side
additional layer of Styrofoam substrate is added on top of the of the rectangular patches), if they are placed at the middle
transmission line (not shown) to increase mechanical stability of the drawer they should be aligned in z direction, and if
and to avoid direct contact between the compartment RFID they are placed more to the side of the blood bag the tags z
tags (C-Tags) and the microstrip. direction has to be aligned with drawer y direction to ensure

Figure 8. Near-field components. (a) X ¼ 0 plane. (b) Z ¼ 0 plane (bottom

part of the antenna surface).

IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 2, April 2015 59
 reader, Arduino Mega ADK, HC-06 Bluetooth transceiver,
Lithium Mega Backpack, and at the end RF switch.

AS3992 UHF RFID reader is made by Solid [7] and is

based on single UHF RFID chip reader AS3992. The reader
is capable of working in various frequency bands conform-
ing to different world standards. Here, it is set to work from
902 to 928 MHz, as required by the contest proposal. It is
compatible with ISO18000-6C protocol (EPC Gen2 proto-
col) and maximum output RF power is 20 dBm (0.1 W),
which complies fully with the limit of 4-W equivalent isotro-
pically radiated power (EIRP) limit. The reader is prepro-
Figure 9. Simulated and measured input return loss of gramed by the manufacturer to communicate with external
the drawer antenna. The vertical lines denote the UHF components (such as a PC or a microprocessor board) by a
RFID band (902–928 MHz). two-way Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter se-
rial interface, which, in our case, is connected to the Arduino
good detection. Complementary behavior of components Ez Mega ADK. The reader is able to inventory various passive
and Ey can be observed in xy plane as well. The C-Tags are RFID tags in less than 6 ms. Using the correct command, the
placed flat in this plane and since Ey component has the null reader is prompted to make an inventory round, and upon
at the middle they have to be placed more to the sides of the completing, it reports back all the tags EPC numbers. The
microstrip with their polarization (direction of the soldered reader board is shown in Figure 10a. The total size of the
chip) aligned with y. board is 90 mm
49 mm.

Simulated and measured input return loss of the empty Arduino is the core controlling element of the transceiver
drawer antenna is presented in Figure 9 along with measure- unit. It controls the RFID reader and the HC-06 Bluetooth
ment when the drawer is full (five C-tags and five blood bags transceiver. The Arduino Mega ADK [8] used here is chosen
equipped with B-Tags). As seen, s11 parameter is below 10 dB because unlike other models, it has more than one serial com-
for the total UHF RFID band as is required both for the empty munication interface, which are needed for communication
drawer and when multiple blood bags are positioned inside the with the reader and with the Bluetooth transceiver. This specific
drawer. This is important because the blood bags tend to drain board was chosen for this project because it has four different
out the power of the drawer antenna and for this reason it could serial interfaces for communications with other devices,
influence the reading of tags. However, it is demonstrated here whereas all other Arduino boards have only one. By default,
and in the final competition video [1] that the drawer antenna one serial interface is dedicated for PC communication via
is capable of detecting the C- and B-Tags even when multiple USB cable, which is used to program the board, and the other
compartments are occupied. three are free to use; here, two of them are used for communi-
cation with the RFID reader and the Bluetooth transceiver.
Figure 10b shows the Arduino Mega ADK. The total size of
Arduino Mega ADK is 100 mm
50 mm. Arduino board
5. Hardware Description comes without any programming, and an open source develop-
ment environment IDE 1.0.5 [19] is used to create, compile,
Here, the hardware components used to make our trans- and upload sketches to the Arduino board. Sketch is the code
ceiver unit are described in detail: AS3992 UHF RFID that runs on the Arduino board microprocessor.

Figure 10. (a) AS3992 UHF RFID reader. (b) Arduino Mega ADK. (c) HC-06 Blue-
tooth transceiver. (d) Lithium Mega Backpack.

60 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 2, April 2015
 HC-06 [9] is a simple Bluetooth transceiver, which en- Table 3. Electrical connections for the transceiver unit.
ables an Arduino board to communicate wirelessly with a
PC by assigning one of its serial interfaces to the transceiver.
This transceiver is compatible with almost all Arduino
boards, and all integrated or external PC Bluetooth inter-
faces. Figure 10c shows the outlook of the transceiver used
here, with overall size of 20 mm
15 mm.

The Lithium Mega Backpack [10], i.e., Figure 10d, is

based on a Li-ion battery and provides regulated 3.3 and 5 V
as needed to all other boards used for the transceiver. The
Li-ion battery can be charged by a mini USB cable directly
from any PC without any software needed and it has a
2200 mAh of capacity, which is approximately 8 h of au-
tonomous operation of the entire system.

5.1 Hardware Assembly presented here is a newer version of the GUI in the competi-
tion video [1], and the only difference is in the visual ap-
All of the hardware components (Arduino, RFID pearance of the control panels.
Reader, Bluetooth transceiver, Battery Backpack) are as-
sembled in a single transceiver unit of approximate size of Bluetooth Communication panel is used for establishing
100 mm
100 mm
150 mm, as shown in Figure 11. and canceling the Bluetooth communication between the PC
140 mm
80 mm acrylic support boards are made for the and the Transceiver Unit. The communication is started by
Arduino, RFID reader, and the Battery Backpack, and they pressing button “Start” and stopped by pressing “Stop.”
are fixed together using metallic screws and nuts. The sup- When the Bluetooth connection is established the icon on
porting acrylic boards are also joined together with the RF the right side of panel is illuminated in blue such as in
switch board using metallic screws and nuts, and finally, the Figure 12b. RFID Tag Inventory panel is used for reading
Bluetooth transceiver is fixed to one of the cube sides to the tags and aside from the button “Single read,” it com-
have better omnidirectional coverage. The electrical connec- prises an indicator light that is red when a reading is in prog-
tions that need to be made between the transceiver compo- ress and it turns green when the tags have been successfully
nents can be found in Table 3. read as in Figure 12b. Upon clicking the “Single read” but-
ton the program sends a command via the Bluetooth object
to the Arduino to start one interrogation round of the RFID
6. Software Description

A student version of MATLAB was used to make a

control software GUI using GUIDE (MATLAB wizard for
making GUIs). The initial screen is shown in Figure 12a,
aside from the name of our team (Lx-ITeam), it comprises
three control panels on the left side of the screen, and a
panel for the one of the cabinet drawers with message
screens for each of the drawer compartments. The GUI

Figure 11. Assembled transceiver unit with a scale and a Figure 12. The GUI developed in MATLAB. (a) Initial
common ballpoint pen for size notion. state. (b) Example of functioning state.

IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 2, April 2015 61
 Figure 13. Arduino sketch flowchart.

Reader. Arduino sends the appropriate API command to the Bluetooth transceiver and button “Start” in the Bluetooth
RFID Reader and waits for its response. The response con- panel is clicked. All C-Tags are placed in their correspond-
taining EPC numbers of all found tags is returned by Blue- ing compartments, and “Single read” button is clicked next.
tooth to the MATLAB program. Depending on the previous Now, a blood bag with B-Tag can be placed in any of the
state the program checks if any compartments have been compartments and its data will be shown in the GUI window
filled (equals to disappearing compartment C-tag EPC num- after clicking the “Single read” button to refresh the list of
ber form the list) or emptied (equals to appearing compart- read tags. This means that only one bag can be placed in the
ment C-tag EPC number on the list), and by which blood drawer in each reading cycle in order to be able to correctly
bag (EPC of blood bag B-tags appear on the list). In the Sta- determine the occupied compartment. To stop operating the
tus panel a status bar shows the progress of the action and system “Stop” in the Bluetooth panel has to be clicked,
according actions status messages are shown. which will stop the PC connection with the transceiver unit.
For more intuitive view of the system operating please refer
The flowchart for the Arduino sketch (the code that is to the competition video [1].
run on it) is shown in Figure 13. By default the code runs in
loop upon powering the Arduino on. When the command to
read tags is received through Bluetooth communication the
RFID reader is prompted to read the tags and the collected in- 7. System Performance
formation is forwarded to the PC back through Bluetooth.
Figures 14–16 show the flowchart of the algorithms imple- To evaluate the system performance the complete sys-
mented in the MATLAB GUI. The actions that happen upon tem has to be assembled, the cabinet unit is made of K-line
pressing “Start” and “Stop” buttons in the Bluetooth control sheets, and the individual drawers can be constructed or
panel are shown in Figure 14. The tag reading and state de- bought. As shown in the competition video [1] the RFID-
tection are described in Figure 15. Upon prompting the trans- based Smart Blood Stock System is capable of detecting
ceiver to read and receiving tag EPC’s a series of decisions various tag equipped blood bags at the same time. At the be-
are made to determine which changes have happened in the ginning of the video a demonstration is performed in which
drawer contents. The decisions are based on which changes various tagged blood bags are in the drawer and the system
have occurred in the tag presence list compared with the pre- correctly recognized each one of them. The video also
vious reading: changes both in detected C-Tag and B-Tag contains a demonstration of the role of the C-Tag and of the
lists, or a change only in C-Tag or only in B-Tag list. B-Tag. Additionally, a demonstration of both tags robustness
is also presented, i.e., two bags are placed in the drawer in two
Figure 16 shows the three subalgorithms from compartments in a way that there is an empty compartment in
Figure 15, i.e., first algorithm [see Figure 16a] shows how a between. They are also detected correctly and the compartment
newly placed bag is detected; second algorithm [see tag in between as well, which means that the bags did not in-
Figure 16b] shows how the C-Tags are detected at the first read- fluence the C-Tag in the middle. Next, a tag equipped bag is
ing; and the third algorithm [see Figure 16c] shows how an error placed in the middle compartment, and it is also correctly de-
in bag placing is detected. tected, which shows that the adjacent bag did not negatively
influence the blood bag tag. For better understanding of the
To operate the RFID-based Smart Blood Stock System, principle please refer to the competition video [1].
it is first necessary to upload the code to the Arduino using a
USB cable and a PC with the IDE environment. Electrical As previously said the pseudolocalization method used
connections as described in Section 5.1 Table 3 should be here has only one fundamental limitation in order to be reli-
made next and the transceiver is the powered on. Then the able, only one bag per cycle can be placed in one drawer
GUI is run in MATLAB on a PC with a built-in or external compartment in order to be able to accurately connect the
“disappeared” C-Tag with the B-Tag that “appeared.” In the
system implemented here that takes a few seconds, however
by using faster RFID reader and faster microprocessor, pref-
erentially all collocated on a single board along with the
Bluetooth transceiver (fully integrated system), that time
would be significantly shorter. Here, for the sake of principle
Figure 14. MATLAB control code flowchart for Bluetooth demonstration the response time is not the most critical
communication. factor.

62 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 2, April 2015
 Figure 15. MATLAB code flowchart for tag reading.

8. Conclusion necessary for system operation. The pseudolocalization prin-

ciple has been implemented in a novel way in order to de-
The presented system is intended for use in blood tect not only, in which drawer the blood bag is but also, in
banks that manage and store blood for transfusion. The sys- which drawer compartment. To achieve this, each drawer
tem is capable of localizing and identifying various blood has a reader antenna incorporated in the bottom, and each
bags placed in the cabinet as seen in [1]. It is based on compartment has a dedicated RFID C-Tag. The bags are
UHF RFID technology and comprises a cabinet model, a also tagged with dedicated RFID B-Tags and by combining
transceiver unit, and a PC used to run the software the detection of both tag types each bag is identified and

Figure 16. State detection algorithms from the tag reading code. (a) Algo-
rithm 1. (b) Algorithm 2. (c) Algorithm 3.

IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 2, April 2015 63
localized inside the cabinet. The drawer reader antennas are 10. References
specially designed to have confined radiation pattern in
order not to detect tags from other drawers. The B-Tags [1] Lx-ITeam Video Submission for IEEE AP-S 2014 Student Design Contest.
were codesigned with the blood bags in order to be resilient [Online]. Available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq6CPM-yyM4
[2] Blood Facts and Statistics. American Red Cross, Washington, DC, USA.
to the blood proximity, which was accomplished by having [Online]. Available: http://www.redcrossblood.org/learn-about-blood/
a ground plane incorporated in the tag geometry. The big- blood-facts-and-statistics
gest challenge to minimize the B-Tag size was achieved by [3] Fatalities Reported to FDA Following Blood Collection and Transfu-
sion: Annual Summary for Fiscal Year 2013. U.S. Food and Drug
adjusting the sizes of the two metallic patches, optimizing Administration, Silver, Spring, MD, USA. [Online]. Available: http://
the substrate thickness and location of the shorting vias. On www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/ReportaProblem/
the contrary to B-Tag, the C-Tag was designed to signifi- TransfusionDonationFatalities/ucm391574.htm
[4] Blood Bag Labeling. BarcodesInc, Chicago, IL, USA. [Online]. Available:
cantly detune in blood presence by having classical mean- http://www.barcodesinc.com/news/?p=4612
dered dipole geometry. [5] Guideline for the Uniform Labeling of Blood and Blood Components.
FDA Center for Drugs and Biologics, Bethesda, MD, USA. [Online].
Available: http://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Guidance
The transceiver unit and the cabinet are small and ComplianceRegulatorGuidanceComp/Guidances/Blood/UCM080974.pdf
transportable, as well as battery powered and low cost. The [6] R. R. Sharma, S. Kumar, and S. K. Agnihotri, “Sources of preventable
proposed pseudolocalization strategy proved to be effective errors related to transfusion,” Vox Sanguinis, vol. 81, no. 1, pp. 37–41,
Jul. 2001.
to adding localization capability to the existing passive UHF [7] Solid Digi. [Online]. Available: http://www.soliddigi.com/portfolio/
RFID-based identification technology. The same strategy can as3992-uhf-rfid-reader/
be extended to other user applications. [8] Arduino. [Online]. Available: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardADKL.
UytcL_nV-nw
[9] InMotion. [Online]. Available: http://www.inmotion.pt/store/hc06-serial-
bluetooth-brick
[10] Liquidware. [Online]. Available: http://www.liquidware.com/shop/show/
9. Appendix 1. Bill of Materials BPM/Mega+Backpack

64 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 2, April 2015
[11] C. R. Medeiros, J. R. Costa, and C. A. Fernandes, “RFID smart shelf Marta R. da Silva is currently working to-
with confined detection volume at UHF,” IEEE Antennas Wireless Pro- ward the Licenciado (B.Sc. equivalent) de-
pag. Lett., vol. 7, pp. 773–776, Oct. 2008. gree in telecommunications engineering and
[12] H. Rajagopalan and Y. Rahmat-Samii, “Conformal RFID antenna design computer science at the Instituto Universitário
suitable for human monitoring and metallic platforms,” in Proc. 4th de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Lisbon, Portugal.
EuCAP, Apr. 12–16, 2010, pp. 1–5. She is interested in antenna theory and radio-
[13] M.-C. Tsai, I.-G. Li, C.-W. Chiu, and H.-C. Wang, “UHF RFID PIFA frequency identification (RFID) applications.
array tag antenna for human body applications,” in Proc. 15th Int. Symp. Ms. Silva was the recipient of the first
WPMC, Sep. 24–27, 2012, pp.434–437. prize in the 2014 AP-S Student Design Con-
[14] Alien Technology. [Online]. Available: http://www.alientechnology.com test together with three team colleagues for
[15] Dielectric Properties of Body Tissues. [Online]. Available: http://niremf. designing and building a RFID-based Smart
ifac.cnr.it/tissprop/ Blood Stock System.
[16] G. Marrocco, “The art of UHF RFID antenna design: impedance
matching and size-reduction techniques,” IEEE Antennas Propag. Mag.,
vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 66–79, Feb. 2008.
[17] CSTVComputer Simulation Technology. [Online]. Available: http:// Jorge R. Costa (S’97–M’03–SM’09) was
www.cst.com born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1974. He was the
[18] C. C. Cruz, J. R. Costa, and C. A. Fernandes, “Hybrid UHF/UWB an- recipient of the Licenciado and Ph.D. degrees
tenna for passive indoor identification and localization systems,” IEEE in electrical and computer engineering from the
Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 61, no. 1, pp. 354–361, Sep. 2013. Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Technical
[19] Arduino, (Accessed: January 2015). [Online]. Available: http://arduino. University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal, in
cc/en/Main/SoftwareL.Uyty7PnV-nw 1997 and 2002, respectively.
He is currently a Researcher with the Insti-
tuto de Telecomunicações, Lisbon, Portugal.
Andela Zaric (S’12) received the B.Sc. degree He is also an Associate Professor with the
in electrical engineering and information tech- Departamento de Ciências e Tecnologias da
nology and the M.Sc. degree in information Informação, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa
and communication technology from the Fac- (ISCTE-IUL). His present research interests
ulty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, include lenses, reconfigurable antennas, microelectromechanical system
University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia, in 2009 switches, ultrawideband, multiple-input–multiple-output, and radio-frequency
and 2011, respectively. She is currently work- identification antennas. He is the coauthor of four patent applications and more
ing toward the Ph.D. degree in the Instituto than 100 contributions to peer reviewed journals and international conference
Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, proceedings. More than 20 of these papers have appeared in IEEE Journals.
Lisbon, Portugal Prof. Costa is currently serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANS-
She is a Researcher with the Instituto de ACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION and he was a Guest Editor of the
Telecomunicações (IT). Her research interests Special Issue on “Antennas and Propagation at mm- and Sub mm-Waves,”
include ultrawideband and radio-frequency from the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, April 2013.
identification (RFID) antennas for identification and localization.
Ms. Zaric was the recipient of the first prize in the 2014 AP-S Student
Design Contest together with three team colleagues for designing and build- Carlos A. Fernandes (S’86–M’89–SM’08)
ing a RFID-based Smart Blood Stock System. In 2013 she received a travel received the Licenciado, M.Sc., and Ph.D.
and attendance grant for European School of Antennas course “Antennas degrees in electrical and computer engineering
and Propagation for Body-Centric Wireless Communications.” from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST),
Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal,
Catarina C. Cruz was born in Lisbon, Portu- in 1980, 1985, and 1990, respectively.
gal, in 1986. She received the Licenciado and He joined IST in 1980, where he is presently
the M.Sc. degrees in telecommunications engi- a Full Professor with the Department of Elec-
neering and computer science from the Institu- trical and Computer Engineering in the areas
to Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), of microwaves, radio wave propagation, and
Lisbon, in 2009 and 2011, respectively. She is antennas. He is a Senior Researcher with the
currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at Instituto de Telecomunicações and member of
the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Technical the Board of Directors. He has been the leader
University of Lisbon, Lisbon. of antenna activities in National and European Projects as RACE 2067VMBS
Since 2010, she has been a Researcher with (Mobile Broadband System), ACTS AC230VSAMBA (System for Advanced
the Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT), focus- Mobile Broadband Applications) and ESA/ESTECVILASH (Integrated Lens
ing her work on antennas for wireless commu- Antenna Shaping). He has coauthored a book, a book chapter, and more than
nications. Her current research interests are in 150 technical papers in peer reviewed international journals and conference
the area of antennas for radio-frequency identification (RFID) and lenses. proceedings, in the areas of antennas and radiowave propagation modeling.
Ms. Cruz was the recipient of the first prize in the 2014 AP-S Student His current research interests include dielectric antennas for millimeter-wave
Design Contest together with three team colleagues for designing and build- applications, antennas and propagation modeling for personal communication
ing a RFID-based Smart Blood Stock System. She received a travel and at- systems, radio-frequency identification antennas, and artificial dielectrics and
tendance grants for European Schools of Antennas courses: “Terahertz metamaterials.
Technology and Applications” and “Antenna Project Management” in 2012 He was a Guest Editor of the Special Issue on “Antennas and Propagation at
and 2011, respectively. mm- and Sub mm-Waves,” from the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND
PROPAGATION, April 2013.
António M. de Matos is currently working
toward the Licenciado (B.Sc. equivalent) de-
gree in telecommunications engineering and
computer science at the Instituto Universitário
de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Lisbon, Portugal.
He is interested in antennas and electromag-
netic propagation, in general, and in radio-
frequency identification (RFID) applications.
Mr. Matos was the recipient of the first
prize in the 2014 AP-S Student Design Con-
test together with three team colleagues for
designing and building a RFID-based Smart
Blood Stock System.

IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 2, April 2015 65