Batteryless wireless temperature/humidity sensor for item-level smart pharma packaging

In the Industry 4.0 era, pharmaceutical industries demands for technologies to guarantee for drug safety by monitoring the environmental conditions to which the drug is exposed throughout the production and supply chain. This work proposes an item-level smart packaging solution based on RFID technology to measure wirelessly and without embedded battery source the temperature and relative humidity inside a pharmaceutical pill packaging. The designed 30mm× 20mm flexible rH-T RFID probe can be read up to 20 cm in fully passive mode. The achieved sensing accuracy as measured in a climate chamber (±5% and ±1 °C) complies with the typical requirements of quality control standards and cold chain regulations.