Design of Multiband Printed Flexible antenna for Body Wearable Applications

Abstract

Design of Wearable antennas for Body Wireless Sensor Networks (BWSN) especially for healthcare systems shall provide opportunities in wireless monitoring, communication, and effective treatment.In this paper, we present the design and analysis of a multi-band printed flexible antenna for ubiquitous monitoring applications.The proposed antenna is designed on a cotton material and consists of a circular patch and ground plane.The cotton material is highly flexible and has a dielectric constant of 1.60, dielectric tangent of 0.04 and, a thickness of 1mm.The antenna is fed using a microstrip feedline with an impedance of 50Ω.The antenna facilitates operation at the fundamental frequency band of 2.4 GHz and multi-band operation at 4, 5.5 and 7.4 GHz with -10dB reflection coefficient bandwidths of 2.4 -2.5 GHz, 4 -4.12GHz, 5.25 -5.65 GHz and, 7.2 -7.5 GHz respectively.The antenna offers stable electrical characteristics in both frequency and time domain making it suitable for wearable applications in healthcare systems.