Low-profile wideband stick-on antenna for body-area communication

We propose a low-profile antenna for wideband near-field communication that is intended to be integrated with an energy harvesting circuit and a storage device to store e.g. medical records of the patient. In case of emergency the stored information can be rapidly downloaded to an external hand-scanner receiver due to the capability of the stick-on antenna to reach very high data rates. In this particular application, the energy is provided by the external reader at 2.4 GHz (ISM band). The antenna was designed using a multilayer numerical phantom to operate in contact with the skin. It has a diameter of approximately 30 mm and works between 2.4 GHz and 7.5 GHz. The proposed antenna also presents low pulse distortion, as indicated by the fidelity factor, and early calculations show it can reach bit rates of around 2.3 Gbit/s. The maximum power allowed by SAR restrictions is evaluated.