Ubiquitous moisture sensing in automaker industry based on standard UHF RFID tags

Automated sensing is a key enabler in contexts like agriculture, smart cities or advanced industries. However, many sensing processes are still performed manually, like car sealing evaluation after a water test in the automaker industry. Providing ubiquitous cost-efficient automated sensing would represent a big step in these contexts. In this paper we present a RFID antenna-based moisture sensor proposal, based on standard UHF tags. The sensing principle is based on analyzing variations in the passive backscatter signal of wet and dry tags. After modeling and evaluating the proposed sensors in laboratory and context scenarios, we obtain consistent results, based on simple statistical analysis of the RFID retrieved data, allowing to infer moisture or water presence in a car. Although intended for the automaker industry, our proposal opens novel ubiquitous cost-efficient sensing possibilities in a broad range of contexts.