On-body characterization of textile antennas for biomedical health monitoring systems

In recent years, application of textiles as sensors in wearable biomedical health monitoring is increasingly popular. Since most of such sensors require the use of a wireless data link for bio-signal transmission back to the care-givers, there exists a need to integrate wearable and flexible antennas onto such wearable monitors to ensure comfort to users. This work presents two all-textile planar inverted-F antennas (PIFAs) for such purpose, and investigates their performance in close proximity of a real human user. Besides featuring broad bandwidths, larger than requirements, both antennas also possess favorable properties, namely compact in size, conformal, and low-cost.