Toward high-value gas sensing in wearable and distrubuted formats: Discrimination of complex patterns of volatiles using multi-response RFID sensors

Wearable and distributed sensors are attractive for monitoring of gases for environmental surveillance, industrial safety, and other applications. For these sensors to be of high value, they need suitable detection accuracy in complex backgrounds. Here, we show accurate detection of volatiles using low-cost sensors based on a radio-frequency identification (RFID) platform. Our design and excitation conditions of RFID sensors provide several outputs that result in three- and four-dimensional sensor response after multivariate spectral analysis. This high dimensionality of sensor response, achieved in measurements of multiple model vapors and complex patterns of volatiles, make these RFID sensors an attractive addition to high-end existing analytical instruments.