A Low-cost Photopaper Based Wideband Wearable Antenna for WBAN Applications

A compact, flexible and low-cost antenna on a commercially available substrate is anticipated in this study for wearable applications of Medical Body Area Network (MBAN) band (2.36 – 2.40 GHz) and Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band (2.40 – 2.48). The proposed antenna fabricated on flexible photopaper based substrate with 0.27 mm thickness. The antenna is a combination of trapezoidal shape radiating patch with a partial ground plane of
$28\ \text{mm} \times 13\ \text{mm}$
. The overall size of the proposed design is
$28 \times 40\ \text{mm}^{2}$
, with 1 mm wide input microstrip feedline. The results of free space analysis reveal that designed antenna yields 1.2 GHz impedance bandwidth, a maximum gain of 1.61 dBi and radiation efficiency of 86% at a centre frequency of 2.45 GHz. The structural deformation evaluated numerically along both x and y axis at three different curvature radii, which show minor frequency shift with an omnidirectional radiation gain patterns. For the on-body evaluation of Specific Absorption Rate (SAR), antenna is tested numerically on the four layered human body model with three different separation levels between antenna and the body model, along with experimental performance evaluation on the 24 years old male volunteer. Both numerical and experimental results of on-body analysis proved that the proposed design has a good robustness to both on-body loading and bending analysis. Thus making our proposed antenna a good candidate for the on-body communication applications.