Integration of an RFID reader antenna with a work glove

RFIDs are widely deployed in the daily life and its application has been growing with the development of the technologies. RFID application includes everything from the card payment systems to military purposes. In the recent decades, there is significant work done on the tags and various tags have been developed depending on the application requirements, but not much work has been done on the wearable RFID readers. A significant step toward making the RFID reader wearable is to develop wearable RFID reader antenna with considerable read range In this thesis, two types of antennas—slotted patch antenna and split ring resonator antenna—are fabricated and their performance on the human hand is analyzed. The material selected as a substrate is EPDM foam material with permittivity 1.26 and tangent loss 0.007. The thickness of the substrate differs in the fabrication of both the antennas. In case of the slotted patch antenna, the substrate thickness is 4mm, whereas, in case of split ring resonator antenna, the thickness of the substrate is 3mm. The material of the radiating element needed to be flexible and with good conductivity. For this reason, nickel plated conductive textile with sheet resistance 0.16Ω/square is used for fabrication. The summary of the results shows the designed antenna is capable of operating on the desired frequency range. However, the SRR antenna is more flexible, lightweight and bendable with the same read range. For the free space measurement, both the antennas showed good agreement between the measured and simulated results. However, due to inaccuracies in the fabrication of the antennas, the resonance frequency is shifted to other frequencies. In addition to that, bending in two planes i.e xz and yz planes, are performed and results are measured. It is observed that the bending effects the return loss and bandwidth of the antenna, when the antenna is bending is along the effective length of the antenna. The reason for the resonance frequency shifting is that it changes the slot dimension of the antenna, which ultimately affects the current path on the antenna surface. Both antennas showed nearly equal read ranges when the Voyantic Reference tag is measured with both the antennas