This paper presents the development of a brand new hardware framework of low-cost, tiny and power-efficient wireless monitoring system. The framework of this wireless personal area monitoring system (WPAMS) includes sub-1GHz RFID interrogator subsystem, antenna subsystem and passive RFID transponder subsystem. Compare to other interrogators, sub-1GHz interrogator achieves larger communication range and suffers fewer reflections in the indoor space. The sophisticated commercial transponder can be easily embedded in the personal belongings without any battery inside. In addition, a lightweight three-pass authentication process helps to form a simple point-to-point short-range identification network which makes our monitoring system is superior to other monitoring systems using active communication technologies, such as Bluetooth, ZigBee, UWB, Wi-Fi, and so on. Six experimental scenarios have been developed to demonstrate the performance on item-level identification. By connecting +5.7/5.5dBi right-hand circularly polarized commercial antennas and +1.7dBi linear polarized antenna, under 1 watt power limitation, the proposed WPAMS has successfully identified all the items within 2-meter range. The current PCB size of interrogator is 2-inch×3.25-inch×0.25-inch and can be reduced in the near future.