Wideband Flexible Textile Antenna with Parasitic Shorted Strips for Body-Centric Communications

A wearable wideband textile patch antenna with two parasitic shorted strips for off-body communications is presented. The antenna exhibits excellent mechanical resilience thanks to a highly flexible polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate and metallized textile conductor. Two parasitic shorted strips are introduced to create a new resonance which significantly widens the overall antenna bandwidth. A stable broadside radiation lobe is generated over the operation frequency from 5.4 to 6.0 GHz for off-body communications, covering part of the 5 GHz Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) bands and the 5.8 GHz Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) bands. The antenna design is fabricated and experimentally validated, with a qualitative agreement between simulation and measurement suggesting that the proposed antenna can be utilized for off-body communications.