Improvement of the on-body performance of a dual-band textile antenna using an EBG structure

A new dual-band wearable textile antenna designed for body-centric communications is introduced. The antenna is fully characterized in free space and on the body model, with and without an electromagnetic band gap (EBG) substrate. The band gap array consists of 3 × 3 elements and is used to reduce the interaction with human tissues. With the EBG back reflector, the radiation into the body is reduced by more than 15 dB. Increases of 5.2 dB and 3 dB gain are noticed at 2.45 GHz and 5.5 GHz, respectively. The results are presented for the return loss, radiation pattern, efficiency, and specific absorption rate (SAR).