The present disclosure relates to wireless indoor positioning systems that track assets such as medical devices and manufacturing equipment.
Wireless real-time location systems (RTLS) that track assets, such as medical devices and manufacturing equipment, have been widely deployed in healthcare organizations and other industries. One challenge with these systems is their inability to notify their users whether the assets being tracked are actively being used. For example, imagine how frustrating it would be to walk 15 minutes across a hospital campus to retrieve an infusion pump only to find that it is already being used by someone else.
Presented herein is an active RFID tag that addresses this issue by periodically monitoring the AC current that the asset is consuming, and determining its usage state based on the amount of current being consumed.
Reference is first made to
The RFID tag 20 includes an enclosure 25 that contains the tag electronics (including a wireless transceiver, an accelerometer for motion detection, magnetic sensors and associated A/D converters, and a battery). A block diagram of the components of the RFID tag is described hereinafter in connection with
The cable clamp 30 behaves like a typical cable clamp, but is made of a non-conducting material such as plastic and contains an integrated thin, flexible ribbon cable 32 with magnetic sensors 34 spaced at a certain interval, e.g., every 3-5 mm. The magnetic sensors 34 are used to provide readings on 2 or 3 axes to be manipulated and combined in vector form. The magnetic sensors 34 can be implemented using either standalone integrated circuits such as the Freescale MAG3110, or using discrete circuits. In the latter case each sensor would generally contain one or more magnetic transducers such as a small PCB with 5-10 turns of copper which are fed into a low-noise amplifier before being sampled and digitized in an A/D.
The screw 40 used to tighten the cable clamp 30 around the circumference of the AC cable may be designed to use a non-standard tool to tighten or loosen it. This would make it difficult for someone to (either accidentally or intentionally) separate the tag from its associated asset.
Since the ribbon cable 32 carries conductive material, a tamper detector could be built by running a wire current loop between two pins on a chip in the tag enclosure that extends the entire length of the ribbon cable. Using this approach, if the ribbon cable 32 gets severed, the loop will stop conducting current, indicating the tag was tampered with.
Alternative form-factors of the tag 20 are possible. For example,
Referring to
As shown in
pg=(xg,yg)=(r0 sin θ,r0 cos θ) (1)
And contains a DC current I/2 running in the positive z direction (coming out of the page), and the conductor 54 is centered at
pb=(xb,yb)=(r0 sin(θ+2π/3),r0 cos(θ+2π/3)) (2)
and has the same current as conductor 42 but running in the opposite direction, i.e., in the negative z direction going into the page. It is assumed that there is no current running through the conductor 56.
The magnetic field B at a position p=(x, y) in the xy plane due to the conductors 52 and 54 can be shown to be Bg+Bp, where
are the magnetic fields due to the conductors 52 and 54, respectively. The μ0 parameter in these expressions is the magnetic permittivity constant μ0=4π×10−7 T·m/A. Note that the magnetic fields Bg and Bb in these expressions are vectors, i.e., they have both a magnitude and a direction.
Let d be the distance between the sensors on the inner surface of the cable clamp 30. When the clamp is tightened so that the sensors are positioned on the outer circumference of the cable, there will be
sensors that fit around the outer circumference (the N+1st sensor will overlap with the 1st sensor and so on). The distance d may be selected so that at least N=4 sensor readings can be obtained for the thinnest cables (i.e., r≈3 mm) to provide adequate sampling, and there should be enough sensors on the clamp to ensure that the entire circumference can be covered for the fattest cables (i.e., r≈7 mm). When the clamp 30 is tightened so that the sensors are positioned on the outer circumference of the cable, the sensor positions can be written as:
The radius of the cable r is the only unknown quantity in the above expression. Note from equation (5) that the first (n=0) sensor is assumed to be positioned on the +y axis; in fact it is used to define the location of the +y axis, the +x axis, and the coordinate system for all the current measurements. Each of the sensors is oriented differently from one another in 3D space, so their magnetic field readings will require coordinate transformations (from the local coordinate systems for each sensor to one global coordinate system) before they can be combined as vector quantities in any meaningful way.
Current Measurement Technique
Reference is now made to
At 210, the magnetic field measurements Bn, n=0, . . . , N−1 are obtained from each of the N sensors at known positions pn surrounding the AC cable (see equation (5)). As described above, if the sensors are oriented differently from one another, any necessary coordinate transformations are performed to map the measurements to the same coordinate system.
At 220, the current is estimated by finding the combination of angular displacement θ, cable outer radius r, conductor distance from cable center r0, and current Î that best match the mathematical model of the expected field strength at positions pn to the magnetic field measurements Bn, and use the estimate Î as the final current estimate. The “best match” may mean in the minimum mean-square error sense, i.e.,
is the expected magnetic field vector at positions pn given model parameters r, r0, θ, and I,
and pn is defined in equation (5) (note that pn depends on the outer radius r).
The operations of 210 and 220 are repeated several times to compute the RMS, yielding an RMS current estimate.
The computation of Î in equation (6) involves a 4D search. There are a number of ways to simplify the computation:
(1) The cable outer radius r can be determined electro-mechanically, e.g., by sensing how much the screw was tightened, or sensing how much of the clamp material covers the circumference of the cable. This would remove the need to search for r in (6).
(2) There is no need to search for I per se as it can be computed mathematically. For a fixed choice of r, r0 and θ, the I that minimizes (6) can be shown to be
(3) From inspection of the plot in
(4) In addition, note from
(a) Find the sensor n0 that has the minimum field strength, i.e., |Bn
(b) Fit a parabola to the 3 sensor readings |Bn|, n=n0−1, n0, n0+1. Let n* be the vertex of that parabola (n will be a fractional number between n0−1 and n0+1, is an interpolated estimate of the angular position that has the minimum field strength). That angular position, in radians, is
The estimate for θ is
AC RMS Current Measurements
Method 200 can be used to measure a DC current or the value of an AC current in the cable at a particular instance in time. Referring to
At 260, the time-varying magnetic sensor outputs Bn(t) are sampled at times kT, k=k1, . . . , k2 using a sampling period T<4π/ω yielding Bn(kT), k=k1, . . . , k2. As described earlier, if the sensors are oriented differently from one another, any necessary coordinate transformations are performed to map the measurements to the same coordinate system.
At 270, one finds the combination of angular displacement θ, cable outer radius r, conductor distance from cable center r0, sinusoidal current RMS amplitude I0 and sinusoidal current phase φ that best match the mathematical model of the expected field strength at positions pn to the magnetic field measurements over the observation interval kT, k=k1, . . . , k2. and use the estimate I0 as the final current estimate. The “best match” may mean in the minimum mean-square error sense, i.e.,
is the expected magnetic field at position pn and sample time kT when a sinusoidal current with RMS amplitude I0 and phase φ and is present in the cable.
Inferring Usage State from Current Measurements
Once the current consumption of the host device has been determined, the usage state can be inferred in most cases by applying a threshold to the current, i.e., conclude the device is actively being used if the current exceeds a (generally device-specific) threshold. The device-specific thresholds can be determined in advance and stored in either a database, or stored locally in non-volatile memory on the device.
Battery Charging
One other well-known challenge with current RTLS tags that can be addressed with the cable clamp approach comes from their need for battery replacement. Most RTLS tags being used today have single-use batteries that must be changed approximately twice a year. Since most hospitals that deploy RTLS use thousands of tags, the operational and material costs of changing their batteries are significant.
The iron bar sensors should not touch one another to ensure that their fields are isolated. The wire-wrapped inductors 320 and 330 are used to convert the magnetic field around the cable into a set of voltage signals that are proportional to the time derivative of the current flowing through the cable. The two inductor leads from each iron bar sensor 310 are fed through a coherent combiner circuit 132 in the RFID tag enclosure and shown in
which gives the maximum likelihood estimate of the phase difference φn between sensor n and sensor 1 output signals given their sampled observation vectors Bn(kT) and Bn(kT), kT, k=k1, . . . , k2.
At 520, once the phase differences φ2, . . . , φN have been estimated, the CPU negates (applies a negative to) these estimated phase differences and writes the negative phase differences −φ2, . . . , −φN to the programmable phase registers in the coherent combiner 132.
Steps 510 and 520 can be repeated periodically by the CPU 125, although in theory an update is only required when the physical orientation of the tag and its sensors changes relative to the cable, i.e., when the tag has moved or removed from the cable.
Split Cable Approach
Another modification to the cable clamp approach that can be used for both current monitoring and battery charging involves the use of a special extension cord between the power cable and the powered asset that has its insulated conductors exposed. This approach, referred to as the “Split Cable Approach”, is technically similar to the approach used in AC current meters today and is considerably less complex than the other approaches discussed earlier. The advantages of this approach are its simplicity and lower manufacturing cost since, as will be discussed shortly, fewer magnetic sensors are required; the disadvantage is that it requires the special extension cord to expose the 3 conductors, which adds back some cost and is aesthetically less attractive.
The cable clamp design would consist of a single iron core (or multiple connected iron cores inside the plastic clamp material) with a single attached wire-wrapped inductor to couple the magnetic field energy runs tangentially around the core. The iron core would be designed to loop snuggly around the positive (green) current-carrying conductor of the 3-conductor extension cable; the other two conductors would pass through the clamp (similar to an AC current meter). The voltage at the output of the inductor is proportional to the time derivative of the current signal running through the green conductor. This signal can be used to either charge the battery or measure how much current is running through the power cord.
To summarize, in one embodiment, presented herein are arrangements of an active RFID tag that is configured to monitor current flow through a cable (e.g., AC power cable) that is connected to a “host” device in order to supply electrical power to the host device. The active RFID tag includes a clamp assembly configured to clamp to an AC power cable, wherein the clamp assembly includes a plurality of magnetic field sensors configured to generate signals indicative of a measure of electrical current flowing through the AC power cable to a host device to which the RFID tag is associated; and an enclosure configured to contain a battery and a wireless transceiver. The enclosure may be defined by one or more walls of a body of the clamp assembly, or the enclosure may be a separate element and the claim assembly is configured to attach to the enclosure.
In one form, a processor is contained in the enclosure and is configured to process signals obtained from the magnetic field sensors to generate the measure of electrical current flowing through the AC power cable. In another form, the processor is configured to process signals obtained from the magnetic field sensors to generate a power usage state of the host device to which the AC power cable is connected. A fastening element (such as a screw) is provided and is configured to be adjusted using a special tool that is not generally available. In still another form, the clamp includes a ribbon cable and a conductive current loop inside the ribbon cable such that loss of electrical current conducted through the current loop indicates that the ribbon cable has been severed. In still another form, the processor is configured to determine a set of model parameters that best match magnetic field readings from the plurality of magnetic field sensors to a mathematical model for the magnetic field readings, and to use a best-match current as an estimate of current flow through the AC power cable.
In another embodiment, a device is provided comprising device including a clamp assembly configured to clamp to an AC power cable, wherein the clamp assembly includes a plurality of magnetic field sensors; and an enclosure configured to contain a battery and a processor. The processor is configured to generate an estimate of current flow through the AC power cable from outputs of the plurality of magnetic field sensors by finding a set of model parameters that best match magnetic field readings from the plurality of magnetic field sensors to a mathematical model for said magnetic field readings, and using a best-match current as the estimate of current flow through the AC power cable.
In still another embodiment, an active RFID tag is provided including a clamp assembly configured to clamp to an AC power cable, wherein the clamp assembly includes a plurality of magnetic field sensors configured to generate output signals based on electrical current flowing through the AC power cable; and an enclosure configured to contain a rechargeable battery, a wireless transceiver, and a combiner circuit configured to combine the output signals from the magnetic field sensors to produce power to charge the rechargeable battery.
The above description is intended by way of example only. Various modifications and structural changes may be made therein without departing from the scope of the concepts described herein and within the scope and range of equivalents of the claims.
This application claims priority to U.S. Application No. 61/980,138, filed Apr. 16, 2014, the entirety of which is incorporated herein by reference.
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