An e-textile antenna for body area network

This paper provides details on an e-textile spiral antenna used in a Body Area Network application. The system senses heart rate, has provisions for fall detection using an inertial measurement unit, and measures ambient temperature. An Arduino microcontroller collects and processes the data and interfaces with a low-energy Bluetooth (BLE) transceiver to transmit data via an e-textile antenna. Data is received via BLE on a custom built Android application running on a Nexus 5 Smartphone. Power received measurements were performed to compare the e-textile spiral antenna with a traditional inset-fed patch antenna.