On-body measurements of embroidered spiral antenna

This paper presents a compact and flexible embroidered spiral antenna that can be used for wearable applications. The antenna is embroidered by using a state of the art digital embroidery machine with multi-strand conducting thread Liberator™. The antenna has been measured on a Specific Anthropomorphic Mannequin (SAM) phantom and a real human. The measurement results show that the SAM phantom emulates the dielectric properties of the human body in a wide frequency band from 0.3 to 3 GHz. The far-field on-body performance of the antenna has been measured by placing the antenna on the SAM phantom in a tapered Anechoic Chamber. Near-field to far-field transformations have been used to produce the far-field performance including radiation pattern, directivity, rrealised gain and radiation efficiency.