Wearable Antennas for Medical Applications

Biomedical industry is in continuous growth in the last few years. Low profile compact antennas are crucial in the development of wearable human biomedical systems. The polarization of the proposed antenna may be linear or dual polarized. Design considerations, computational results and measured results on the human body of several compact wideband microstrip antennas with high efficiency at 434MHz+5% are presented in this paper. The compact dual polarized antenna dimensions are 5x5x0.05cm. The antenna beam width is around 100º. The antennas gain is around 0 to 2dBi. The proposed antenna may be used in Medicare RF systems. The antennas S11 results for different belt thickness, shirt thickness and air spacing between the antennas and human body are presented in this paper. If the air spacing between the new antenna and the human body is increased from 0mm to 5mm the antenna resonant frequency is shifted by 5%. Tunable antennas may be used to compensate variations in the antenna resonant frequency at different locations on the human body.