Effect of Dielectric Properties of Human Hand Tissue on Mobile Terminal Antenna Performance

A good approach when designing antennas for mobile terminals is to optimize them for operation in the vicinity of the user body. The presence of a lossy human tissue in the antenna’s near field has an adverse effect on the radiator’s performance. The focus of this paper is on studying the change in the antenna performance due to the change in the dielectric properties of the human hand holding the mobile terminal. The investigation is conducted by using an antenna array consisting of two identical and symmetrical PIFA antennas covering the frequency band from 5.8 GHz to 7.7 GHz. Several different values of the complex permittivity are assigned to a human hand phantom in the numerical simulations and it is found that the variation of the complex relative permittivity within a large range of values does not change largely the S-parameters and radiation efficiency of the antenna.