DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE OF WEARABLE ULTRAWIDE BAND TEXTILE ANTENNA FOR MEDICAL APPLICATIONS

The concept of wearable products such as textile antenna are being developed which are capable of monitoring, alerting, and demanding attention whenever hospital emergency is needed, hence minimizing labor and resource. In the proposed work using textile material as a substrate, the ultra wideband antenna is designed especially for medical applications. Simulated and measured results here shows that the proposed antenna design meets the requirements of wide working bandwidth and provides 13.08 GHz bandwidth with very small size, washable (if using conductive thread for conductive parts) and flexible materials. Results in terms of bandwidth, radiation pattern, return loss as well as gain and efficiency are presented to validate the usefulness of the current proposed design. The work done here has many implications for future research and it could help patients with such flexible and comfortable medical monitoring techniques. (c) 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 57:1553-1557, 2015