A small tunable and wearable planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA)

Body-centric wireless communications (BCWCs) have received increasing attention due to its potential application in areas such as E-health systems, home care, security, and entertainment. A compact and low-profile wearable planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) with tuning function is presented for BCWCs in this paper. A two-thirds muscle-equivalent phantom is used to model the human's arm. By tuning the proper capacitance of the proposed antenna, the industrial, scientific and medical (ISM, 2.40-2.48 GHz), wireless broadband (WiBro, 2.3-2.39 GHz) and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS, Rx 2.1-2.17 GHz) and meanwhile lower band can also cover 950-956 MHz.