An Flexible Wearable Compact Metamaterial-loaded monopole Antenna for Wireless Body Area Network

In this feild, the challenge is to construct a flexible antenna with good performance in the wearable environment. In this research work, a novel metamaterial loaded antenna is proposed to work in the wireless body area network. By employing a split ring resonator in the ground plane, we are able to obtain reduced size. The size of antenna is 25 mm x 19 mm x 0.3 mm with polyamide substrate making the antenna flexible. The obtained directivity in dB is 3.0529, with a good impedance matching. The proposed antenna is tested on cotton cloth textile material. In addition to this, the obtained specific absorption rate is 0.9 W/kg that is within the permissibe limits. No major difference is seen between the simulated and measured return loss. The return loss is tested with N9926A FieldFox Handheld Microwave Analyzer, 14 GHz. The simulated and measured return loss have been found in good agreement.

I. Introduction

Most of the traditional antennas used are rigid as well as inconvenient to wear. Nowadays the flexible antennas have become a hot research topic in healthcare applications [1], [2]. In the era of healthcare modernization, designing antenna is the most important for biomedical system. Some of the applications of implantable devices are the pacemakers, defibrillators, capsule endoscopy, Breast implants, Cochlear implants and Hip implants [3]. Similarly In medical devices a high importance have been attached with bio-telemetry systems. The bio-telemetry is highly used to monitor physiology, behaviour and energetic status. This has been done by placing the antenna inside the body or on body or near the body [4], [5].