Sensorized Facemask with Temperature RFID Sensor for Cough Analysis

One of the most common symptoms of respiratory pandemics, like COVID-19, is cough. Its monitoring is useful to trace the progress of the disease and to evaluate its severity. Traditional measurement methods are bulky and wired. Instead, wearable and wireless technologies such as the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) could allow the implementation of platforms able to monitor patients remotely. The monitoring of the respiratory function has already profited from the operation of temperature sensors put close to the airways as well as from the sensorization of facemasks, widely used in case of respiratory viruses. In this paper, a UHF RFID temperature sensor tag integrating auto-tuning capability is integrated inside a FFP2 facemask to retrieve temperature profiles used to count and detect three different types of coughing. All the cough shots are consistently detected by the system, and their periodicity and duration can be determined.