Battery-less NFC Sensors for the Internet of Things

Introduction

I.1. From barcodes to the Internet of things

Streamline industrial processes have always been a priority to reduce time and, therefore, to reduce costs. The identification of goods is an important factor to consider in almost any process since it is necessary to track and get specific information about them, hence the importance of automation. The most common method is to use barcode systems on a printed label with an identification number, which is read by an optical device connected to a computer (Palmer 2007) (see Figure I.1)

Figure I.1. Barcode reading. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/girbau/sensors.zip

Barcodes have been included in several places of work such as libraries (Singh and Sharma 2015). They have medical uses, like in identifying blood transfusions (Murphy and Kay 2004) or in the administration of medication (Macias et al. 2018), proving that it is an easy, fast and accurate automatic collection method. Linear barcodes are the most common technology related to automatic identification data capture (AIDC). Usually, the reading methods use both hardware and software implementations. However, there are fully implemented methods with hardware (De Maeyer et al. 2003) and software (Muniz et al. 1999) solutions. Nonetheless, barcodes only contain information in one dimension (1D), containing therefore a limited amount of information. ...