Improvement in read range of an UHF RFID newborn hospital monitoring system using meander line antennas

Theft and exchange of newborns have rise its numbers becoming this topic a big issue that must be face up by hospitals. Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) surveillance is one of the most used solutions. However, CCTV needs human operator and a highly implementation cost. Ultra High Frequency Radio IDentification (UHF RFID) brings an easy and cheap solution to this problematic because of automatic real time control and monitoring of passive elements called tags. This work presents the design of two UHF RFID meander line antennas for newborn hospital monitoring applications. The first antenna is implemented on printed circuit board (PCB) obtaining a read range of 8.25m, a read range improvement of 2.25m is observed compared with commercially available passive systems. The second antenna is fabricated on Rogers Duroid 5880 flexible substrate allowing adhesion to any surface shape, a read range of 6m is obtained. Comercially available system used as reference is composed by a reader CSL 461 and passive tag Confidex Carrier. In order to illustrate this improvement, a monitoring system layout prototype is proposed.