Fully-Textile, Wearable Chipless Tags for Identification and Tracking Applications

Area of Science:

• Textile Engineering
• Electrical Engineering
• Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID)

Background:

• Traditional identification tags often lack seamless integration with wearable items.
• There is a growing need for robust, unobtrusive identification and tracking solutions, particularly in industrial environments.
• Existing chipless RFID tags may not be suitable for direct integration into textiles.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and present two novel fully-textile wearable devices for chipless radio-frequency identification (RFID) and tracking.
• To demonstrate the feasibility of using textile materials for fabricating functional RFID tags.
• To explore the application of these tags in industrial scenarios, such as tracking in the leather industry.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of fully-textile tags using fleece as a substrate and conductive fabric for conductive elements.
• Implementation of two distinct RFID techniques: resonance frequency coding (using presence/absence of resonance peaks in |S21|) and frequency-shift coding (modifying hairpin resonator configuration).
• Numerical simulations and experimental validation of the proposed tag designs and encoding strategies.

Main Results:

• Successful fabrication of entirely-textile, wearable chipless RFID tags.
• Demonstrated effectiveness of both resonance frequency and frequency-shift coding techniques for binary data encoding.
• Numerical and experimental results confirm the suitability of the proposed wearable tags for identification and tracking.

Conclusions:

• The developed fully-textile wearable chipless tags are suitable for identification and tracking applications.
• These tags offer seamless integration with clothing, facilitating user interaction with IoT infrastructure.
• Potential applications include industrial tracking, such as monitoring hides in the leather industry.