Wearable Antenna For Remote Health Monitoring

Remote health monitoring of elderly people is a serious issue of concern. Such an issue can be evaded by using wearable antennas which can get completely integrated onto clothes and use it for remotely transmitting/receiving the sensor data without affecting the elderly's regular habits. This research work aims to study and understand real wearability of the antenna and investigate the challenges in the design and fabrication of highly efficient antenna which can be fabricated on a fully flexible fabric substrate or a solid substrate. A wearable microstrip patch antenna with operating frequencies of 2.3 GHz (FR4 as substrate) and 2.66 GHz (Denim material as substrate) is designed and tested. Prominent materials considered for substrate parts are: Denim fabrics with the relative permittivity
$\unicode{x20AC}\mathrm{r}=1.67$
, and the loss tangent tan
$\delta=0.085$
and FR4 (lossy) with the dielectric constant
$\unicode{x20AC}\mathrm{r}=4.3$
, and loss tangenttan
$\delta=0.025$
material, while conventional copper metal sheets have been used as antenna conductive material. The antenna proposed is designed and simulated using CST simulator, fabricated using flexible copper sheet and tested. Results demonstrate that the designed antenna is very efficient, highly sensitive and of low-cost with performance meeting the expectation of the application in need. Further, proposed wearable antenna may also be attached to human body directly to sense suitable parameters.