Design and evaluation of RFID-based interactive devices
distributed in socio-technical environments
Vitor Carneiro Maia 1,2
1
    Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2
    Univ. Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, LAMIH CNRS UMR 8201, France

                  Abstract
                  This thesis intercepts human-computer interaction, software engineering, and the internet of
                  things. It is applied to health engineering. We propose exploring RFID technology in the
                  Internet of Things by providing a context-aware conceptual model and designing a modular
                  hardware RFID component. The components will extend the features of RFID readers by
                  embedding quality features and mitigating RFID limitations reported in the literature. The
                  component might be fixed or mobile, on vertical or horizontal settings, alone, or in groups. It
                  may be available to different stakeholders of an organization. An evaluation procedure will be
                  proposed for systems using this component. It will be applied to a simulation developed for the
                  health centers 4.0 context by applying it to locating medical equipment. The component will
                  facilitate these devices' management, location, supervision, and operation, which may be vital
                  to saving a patient. We intend to promote RFID technology in IoT systems by facilitating its
                  use and providing comprehensive and easy-to-use guides on how to architect and develop.

                  Keywords 1
                  Internet of Things, RFID, Tabletop, Health Center 4.0

1. Introduction
   The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm based on the pervasive presence of identifiable objects
(things) that can interact and cooperate to reach common goals. Things are uniquely addressable and
equipped with sensing and actuation behaviors [1]. Apart from things, other actors, such as humans and
animals, can interact with IoT systems [11].
   Regarding the identification strategy in IoT, things may be equipped with technologies such as RFID
tags, barcodes, QR codes, and GPS. The selection of technology should depend on the characteristics
and architecture of the software system. For example, the RFID technology is composed of tags and
readers. Actors interacting through RFID usually carry an RFID reader [10] or a tagged object [5]. Tags
may store data and can be determined by nearby RFID readers. Readers may find tags within their
reading ranges, can hold or acquire the tag's data, or can simply identify if certain tags are near or not.
   RFID technology research was motivated by its presence within the architecture of the tabletops
studied at LAMIH2 in UPHF [3] and also by a quick literature review on location technologies. These
tabletops comprise a matrix of 40x40 RFID reader antennas, used to identify at most 1600 tagged
objects placed on their surface. Moreover, Brazilian medical professionals from FIOCRUZ 3 reported
the need for quickly locating medical devices within a hospital. This feature would be especially
necessary during the COVID-19 pandemics. However, Brazilian nurses stated that this was an issue
even in standard cases. Therefore, we were motivated to develop a solution for monitoring and quickly
locating medical equipment from this report. Furthermore, such a solution would also apply to medical
areas in war zones. Therefore, we decided to explore RFID as the identification technology, instead of

E
 ICS ’22: Engineering Interactive Computing Systems conference, June 21–24, 2022, Sophia Antipolis, France
EMAIL: vitor.carneiromaia@uphf.fr
ORCID: 0000-0001-9999-0195
               © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
               Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
               CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
2
    https://www.uphf.fr/LAMIH/en
3
    https://portal.fiocruz.br/
other identification technologies, due to LAMIH's prior knowledge of tabletops equipped with this
capture technology.

2. Problem and Motivation
   A quick literature review was conducted for comparing features of IoT location technologies. The
compared technologies were RFID, GPS, RTK, UWB, and Wi-Fi. Other options may exist but were
not spotted in our literature review. Among these, RFID was adopted for these studies because it is low
cost, works well indoors, the location occurs in a range of 3 meters for ultra-high passive tags, they do
not need batteries and also contains a unique identifier for identifying the tagged objects.
   Intending to learn about IoT and RFID, we decided to create a smart table prototype inspired by the
tabletops used at LAMIH. The prototype followed a tiled architecture, with 4 (2x2) tiles instead of 1600
(40x40). Each tile contained an RC522 RFID reader and an Arduino. A backend was developed in a
Raspberry Pi having an MQTT broker, a dashboard for informing the table's contents in real-time, and
a MySQL database. The development occurred during the COVID-19 pandemics.
   In the same period, researchers from COPPE/UFRJ 4 were developing IoT applications to assist
COVID-19 treatment in hospitals. FIOCRUZ medical professionals reported to COPPE/UFRJ the need
for a mechanism to quickly locate equipment within hospitals. This equipment must be clean and
returned to its correct compartment to be used again. If it is in use, physicians and nurses must have the
means to know where and with whom the equipment is. The demand from FIOCRUZ motivated us to
delve into RFID technology to evolve the previous prototype and develop a robust solution to monitor
equipment within buildings such as hospitals.
   During the prototype development, the first author got in touch with available RFID materials:
ISO/IEC 18000-6 [8], scattered guidelines [9], and several standards by GS1 5. These standards contain
hardware specifications, indicate how RFID systems should be architectured and present documentation
for low-level software development directly with tags and readers. However, none of these guides give
directions regarding the implementation of RFID in context-aware software systems, or regarding the
interaction between them and users.
   From the point of view of software engineers and developers, the existing guides and standards seem
to lack the representation of elements of context-aware IoT systems for the adoption of RFID and the
nature of the interactions with them. Motivated by the seeming lack, this research aims to explore RFID
technology in literature for proposing a conceptual model for representing the structure of such systems
for locating objects in health centers using RFID technology. It will be applied to design an RFID
hardware component for equipment monitoring, which may embed several pre-implemented features.
We intend to validate the feasibility of a system using this component by simulating the implementation
of a Health Centers 4.0 system to locate medical equipment within a hospital.

3. Goal
   Following the quick review on location technologies, a systematic mapping [2] was conducted to
characterize usage issues of RFID technology in the new generation of interactive software systems.
   The usage issues we investigated in this preliminary review are: how RFID technology is used in
projects, who uses it, why was it used instead of other technologies, which are the known requirements
associated with it, which are the common quality characteristics and measures, and which are the most
frequent application domains implementing it. This review gave us a better understanding of how
RFID is implemented in IoT systems and how interactions occur when RFID is involved.
    Another intended objective is to reduce the explicit interactions of the systems implemented in health
centers, so that health professionals focus on their functions instead of on the specificities of the
software system. RFID automatic readings permits the implementation of such systems.
   The goal of this thesis is to define a conceptual model to orchestrate hardware and software for
interactive IoT software systems engineering in health centers.

4
    https://www.cos.ufrj.br/
5
    https://www.gs1.org/standards/rfid
   The research question is: How to support the engineering of interactive IoT software systems for
locating, using, and managing objects considering health centers constraints and minimum explicit
human-computer interaction?

3.1.         Conceptual Model
   The conceptual model represents concepts of IoT, interactivity and context-awareness, while
applying it to concepts of health centers. The IoT paradigm enables the conception of context-aware
systems. The term context-aware appeared for the first time in 1994 [12] to refer to software that adapts
according to its location of use based on nearby people and objects, also affected by their changes over
time [13]. Context-aware systems are aware of their physical, virtual, and human environment and can
adapt, benefiting from the knowledge about a situation [12].
   Concerning the interactions, explicit interactions refer to the traditional use of software systems, such
as explicitly pressing a button. Implicit interactions refer to the implicit collection of inputs, such as
automatically identifying users, collecting data with sensors, and delivering output that was not
explicitly requested [12].
   The conceptual model will represent these entities: users, technology and environment while also
representing the objects, which will be located and managed in the health centers. The model will be
generic and will comprise several concepts existing in health centers, so that it can be instantiated in
systems for specific places such as hospitals, clinics and labs.

3.2.         Design of an RFID Component
   We intend to design an RFID component to assist the development of IoT software systems. This
component will consist of an RFID reader and pre-implemented features. E.g., requirements such as the
reading distance and frequency bands may be configurable; quality measures such as the percentage of
successful readings may be stored and presented in a dashboard; certain algorithms may be embedded
in the component for decreasing false readings; the presence of a tag near a component may trigger an
action by other components through pairing. What to implement will depend on the contents of
conceptual model. Several components will be implemented together to cover a whole place, such as
the rooms of a hospitals, for locating tagged medical equipment.

4. Current Status
    The smart table prototype was developed by the middle of 2020. The systematic mapping, intended
to be a preliminary state of art study, was already conducted. It started in July 2021 and was concluded
in December 2021. We are currently preparing a publication about the systematic mapping, which will
be this research's first publication. For the time being, the protocol and results of the systematic mapping
are available in a technical report 6.
    We first intend to acquire knowledge about RFID technology through this systematic mapping, and
its discussion will be used as a base for achieving the next goals described as part of the methodology.

5. Methodology
      A three-phase methodology was developed to reach the research's goals.

5.1.         Conception Phase
  The systematic mapping delivered plenty of information for most research questions, except for the
questions about quality characteristics, RFID requirements, and limitations. It also spotted that ultra-

6
    https://maia.mobi/arq/tech_report_rfid.pdf
high frequency passive RFID may cause interference in some electrical medical equipment
[4,6,7,14,15]. Due to this limitation, depending on the requirements of a specific health center, it may
be necessary to use other technologies instead, or together with RFID.
   The conception phase will comprise further research on systems for locating objects for better
understanding the important characteristics to be considered in such software systems. Additionally, we
will conduct a systematic literature mapping on another location technology, to verify the feasibility of
mixing technologies in such location systems.

5.2.         Development Phase
   Once the conceptual phase is finished, the design of the conceptual model will begin. It will represent
elements of context-aware systems when applied to health centers, while permitting instantiation for
specific locations, such as hospitals. It will represent the ubiquity level of technologies, in case of
including additional protocols other than RFID. The component will be designed next. It will be used
for monitoring equipment in indoor areas. They will be build based on the knowledge acquired during
the conception of the model.
   We seek to (1) implement support for software quality monitoring by using quality measures; (2)
implement algorithms to mitigate RFID technology's limitations; (3) turn the component as much
configurable as possible through a manager interface; (4) encapsulating functions for surveying tags
given a frequency, pairing with other components, among others. We will build the component as well,
just after designing it.

5.3.         Feasibility Phase
   We wish to evaluate if the components' systems effectively benefit from implementing the
component instead of common RFID architecture. We will elaborate a procedure for assessing the use
of the system based on quality criteria.
   We will check how the built component behaves in distinct applications by verifying its usage and
behavior in several settings: for detecting one or more objects on a shelf (horizontal) and for detecting
one or more objects hanging on walls (vertical); on moving objects (mobile), such as being carried by
a person through a house; when paired to other components (in groups).
   As a final step, we wish to validate the research in the context of Health Centers 4.0. It is unclear if
we will be able to create a real application within a hospital, so we intend to simulate an application by
using a programming tool such as SimPy 7. We plan on developing a system for managing medical
equipment. With the assistance of several RFID components, the system will monitor if tagged
equipment such as defibrillators, wheelchairs, and stethoscopes are in their proper place. The system
will indicate where and who uses them if they are not. The software system may also remind health
professionals to clean the equipment before returning, among other health-related requirements we may
find by this validation. Finally, this system will go through the previously defined evaluation procedure.
Results will be discussed, the proposal will be refined, and every artifact created so far.

6. Conclusion and Future Works
   This research intends to explore RFID technology and providing a conceptual model to facilitae the
development of context-aware IoT software systems for health centers. An RFID component will be
designed and built to extend the functionalities of common RFID readers and provide extra care with
software quality. An evaluation procedure will be developed for systems using the component. These
contributions will be validated by simulating and evaluating a system for Health Centers 4.0 context.
   As overall contributions, this research intends to promote RFID technology in IoT software systems
by facilitating its use and providing comprehensive and easy-to-use guides on how to architect and
develop. In addition, this research intends to improve the location of objects in hospitals and other

7
    https://simpy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contents.html
indoor areas by delivering the design of the RFID component, its documentation, example applications,
and an evaluation procedure.

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