Evaluation of NFC-Enabled Devices for Heterogeneous Wearable Biomedical Application

Biomedical systems that aim at monitoring parameters over a long period of time will require non-invasive wearable devices. A wide range of applications, including continuous workers monitoring or daily monitoring of patients, is expected to exploit wearable devices, each one characterized by different requirements. Such devices will adopt a design that minimizes discomfort and does not limit users' mobility to allow round-the-clock wearability. In order to ensure a significant reduction in the size of wearable devices, the next generation of this technology will need no batteries or at least very small ones. In this paper we analyze the use of Near Field Communication (NFC) for ultra-low-power communication in wearable devices for biomedical applications. Our goal is to verify whether NFC technology can support the heterogeneous requirements of different biomedical use-cases. For this purpose, we will first provide a review of the current state of the art in NFC-Enabled solutions. Then, we will evaluate NFC capabilities through a set of experiments, using off-the-shelf devices. We will pose particular focus on the energy harvesting capabilities to evaluate the feasibility of designing battery-less devices. Our results show that NFC adoption in different biomedical applications is possible, as they can ensure proper reading frequency and distance. Finally, we further demonstrate this through a proof-of-concept implementation: an NFC-based sensorized glove for work safety that is able to monitor the external temperature in a continuous manner.