RFID Tags as Passive Temperature Sensors

Temperature sensing and monitoring play a vital role in various applications. Non-invasive, item-level temperature sensing methods that require no direct line of sight with the measuring object are attractive. This paper presents such a temperature sensing method using commodity RFID tags with no infrastructure changes. RFID tags are widely deployed for product identification purposes. We explore the possibility of leveraging the RSSI measurements from commodity RFID tags for temperature sensing. Essentially, we model a relationship between the temperature and the relative permittivity of a material in terms of RSSI. Our method can measure temperature in the range of 22°C to 60°C and achieves a measurement accuracy of 2°C with a mean error of 1.5°C.