Fabrication and Practical Evaluation of Glove-integrated Passive UHF RFID Tags

Passive RFID-based technology is a convincing approach to achieve versatile energy- and cost-efficient wireless platforms for future wearable applications. In this paper, we present passive UHF RFID tags integrated into normal work gloves for wearable RFID applications. We introduce embroidery as a new efficient antenna fabrication method for glove-integrated tags as well as establish reference glove-tag antennas from electro-textiles and copper tape. The performance of the three types of glove-tags is evaluated on a male test subject in an anechoic room and in an office environment. Based on the wireless measurement results, the read ranges of the embroidered glove-tags were around 1 meter in an anechoic chamber and in an office, when measured near the human body. These results meet the requirements of many practical applications of glove-tags, although the read ranges are shorter than those of the electro-textile and copper tape tags that showed read ranges of 2-2.5 meters. Finally, the developed glove-tags were successfully tested in actual use situations for identification and access control. These results are very promising, especially considering the cost effectiveness of embroidered tag antennas and the easiness of their integration into different types of gloves.