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Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest in the development of wearable health monitoring devices for round-the-clock clinical observation and fitness applications.  Wearable monitors in literature and industry have common themes of battery powered operation for digitizing and transmitting the sensed biosignals. However, such sensors need to have their batteries replaced or recharged and are usually unable to provide continuous monitoring due to the need for conserving power through intermittent active and sleep mode cycles.

The research proposes a passive UHF RFID based sensor system with heart rate monitoring as a focused application. The proposed research targets improvement over contemporary wearable sensors with battery-free and continuous operation; and improvement over other RFID systems with longer operable range and faster start-up time. These research targets are achieved by (1)novel RFID based transmission(RFID tag is used as a pulse width modulation device), (2) power harvesting for sensing, (3) low-power bio-signal detection and (4) application specific antenna design.  Furthermore, the research will attempt to address the issue of determining  heart rate variability using the RFID heart rate data.