A Contactless Sensor for Human Body Identification using RF Absorption Signatures

Indoor human detection and localization sensors are at the base of many automation and monitoring systems. This work presents an indoor tagless passive human body identification method. It uses a load-mode capacitive sensor to detect the differences in the conductive and dielectric properties of the human body due to differences in body constituency. The experimental results show that four male individuals with similar height but different body mass index (BMI) standing at 70 cm in front of a chest-level 16 cm x 16 cm sensor plate determine different capacitance-frequency characteristics over a 5 kHz-160 kHz range, which can be used to identify the person.