The enhancement of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to track and trace objects has attracted a lot of attention from the healthcare and the supply chain industry. However, RFID systems do not always function reliably under complex and variable deployment environment. In many cases, RFID systems provide only probabilistic observations of object states. Thus, an approach to predict, record and track real world object states based upon probabilistic RFID observations is required. Hidden Markov model (HMM) has been used in the field of probabilistic location determination. But the inherent duration probability density of a state in HMM is exponential, which may be inappropriate for modeling of object location transitions. Hence, in this paper, we put forward a hidden semi-Markov model (HSMM) based approach for probabilistic location determination. We evaluated its performance comparing with that of the HMM-based approach. The results show that the HSMM-based approach provides a more accurate determination of real world object states based on observation data. © Shanghai Jiaotong University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.