The effects of recurrent stretching on the performance of electro-textile and screen-printed ultra-high-frequency radio-frequency identification tags

Future welfare and healthcare applications require wearable radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags where the tag antenna is an integral part of clothing and endures repeated stretching. In this study, wearable passive ultra-high-frequency (UHF) RFID tag antennas were fabricated from silver-plated stretchable fabric and by screen printing them on non-conductive, stretchable fabric. The reliability of the tags was studied by stretching them repeatedly from the initial length of 10 cm to 13.5 cm, up to 200 stretching cycles. According to our results, the electro-textile tags achieved read ranges of 6.5 meters, also after the 200 harsh stretches. The screen-printed tags initially achieved read ranges of 9.5 meters and after the 200 stretches the read ranges were only 2.5 meters shorter, that is, still about 7 meters. These measurement results and the strengths and weaknesses of both types of wearable tags are discussed in this paper.