Reading range of wearable textile RFID tags in real configurations

Recent progresses in the design of wearable RFID tag antennas stimulate the idea of passive body centric systems wherein the required power to drive the wearable tags is directly scavenged from the interrogation signal emitted by the reader unit. While active bodycentric links have been extensively investigated, the feasibility of passive systems is still questionable due to the poor sensitivity of the tags and to the modest read distances. This paper describes an articulated measurement campaign with textile wearable low-profile tags in the UHF RFID band. It is demonstrated that both on-body and off-body links are feasible with a power budget fully compliant with the available technology. The experiments permits to identify the most efficient tag placements and to propose some quantitative and general guidelines useful to characterize and design this kind of new systems.