Maintenance-free moisture sensor on dishcloth substrate

In this study, a passive UHF RFID-based moisture sensor is fabricated and evaluated. The sensor tag can sense the high humidity of the environment and indicate it with a permanent change in its backscattered signal. The sensor tag antenna and antenna-IC interconnections are fabricated on a biodegradable dishcloth material using conductive thread. The sensors are tested in an anechoic chamber and in normal office conditions, when initially dry, after dipped into water for 1 minute, and again after 24 hours of drying in air. These sensor tags initially show read ranges of 6-9 meters throughout the global UHF RFID frequency band. When wet, the read range decreases to 5 meters, while after 24 hours of drying, the read ranges of the tags permanently decrease to around 2-4 meters. The dishcloth material comes thicker when wet, also causing a change to the embroidered antenna structure, finally causing the permanent change in the backscattered signal. In normal office conditions, moisture causes the average backscattered signal an obvious change from around -66 dBm to -69 dBm.