Research Article
Active Textile Antennas as a Platform for More Energy-Efficient and Reliable Wireless Links in Healthcare
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-37893-5_35, author={Hendrik Rogier and Frederick Declercq and Patrick Torre and Luigi Vallozzi}, title={Active Textile Antennas as a Platform for More Energy-Efficient and Reliable Wireless Links in Healthcare}, proceedings={International Workshop on “Advances in Wireless Physical Layer Communications for Emerging Healthcare Applications”}, proceedings_a={IWAWPLC}, year={2013}, month={4}, keywords={Smart Fabrics and Interactive Textiles wearable electronics active textile antennas MIMO signal processing}, doi={10.1007/978-3-642-37893-5_35} }- Hendrik Rogier
Frederick Declercq
Patrick Torre
Luigi Vallozzi
Year: 2013
Active Textile Antennas as a Platform for More Energy-Efficient and Reliable Wireless Links in Healthcare
IWAWPLC
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-37893-5_35
Abstract
New wireless wearable monitoring systems worn by patients and caregivers require a high degree of reliability and autonomy. We show that active textile antenna systems may serve as robust platforms to deploy such wireless links, in the meanwhile being comfortable and invisible to the wearer, thanks to recent developments in the design process combined with dedicated signal processing techniques. The key idea is to exploit the large amount of real estate available in patients’ and caregivers’ garments to deploy multiple textile antennas each with a size large enough to make them efficient radiators when deployed on the body. The antenna area is then reused by positioning active electronics directly underneath and energy harvesters directly on top of the antenna patch, ensuring the autonomy of the module. Combining different antenna signals by means of low-power multi-antenna processing techniques then ensures good signal quality at low transmit power in all situations.