The Effects of Ground-Plane of a Textile Higher Mode Microstrip Patch Antenna on SAR

This work studies the human exposure to EMFs that are generated by textile microstrip patch antenna and proposes a generalized methodology to reduce it. First, an antenna -commonly used for wearable applications- that highly interacts with the human body is investigated. To reduce exposure, the radiation directed onto the body is controlled by resizing the ground-plane. Despite this modification, the antenna maintains acceptable performance, its low profile, and low material and fabrication costs. Simulations show that as the ground-plane increases: (i) back radiation is mitigated leading to significant SAR reduction; (ii) the antenna interacts less with the human phantom and demonstrates acceptable performance. As the antenna under investigation is a typical one for body-centric communications and the ground-plane resize is a simple procedure, the proposed methodology may be applied to a vast variety of wearable applications.