Compact UWB Wearable Textile Antenna for On-body WBAN Applications

Abstract

Wearable textile antennas have obtained remarkable attention in various medical fields due to their ease of integration and flexibility.This paper puts forward an Ultra Wide Band (UWB) Compact Textile Wearable Antenna (CTWA) for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications.The proposed antenna is a semicircular slotted elliptical antenna with an L-shaped stub and a partial defected ground plane.The antenna is fabricated on denim jeans (ϵr = 1.77) and has an overall dimension of 27 × 28 × 0.7 mm with an operating frequency range 3.01-15.98GHz, radiation efficiency of 83.5-90.11%,and maximum gain of 5.81 dBi.Structural deformation studies including human body loading of the antenna are carried out, and the performance of the antenna is found to be stable.The proposed antenna has a low profile and high fractional bandwidth (137%) compared to the UWB wearable antennas reported in the literature.The calculated Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) of the antenna at the frequencies 4,7 and 10 GHz are 1.2, 1.06, and 1.58 W/Kg, respectively, which lies within the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) standard.The proposed CTWA is compact, flexible, wearable, and robust, which makes it suitable for on-body WBAN applications.