Metamaterial inspired fabric antenna for wearable applications

A compact and robust fabric antenna incorporated with metamaterials (MTM) at 2.4 GHz is introduced for wearable devices application where the MTM behaves as EBG/AMC. The benefit of introducing MTM in a wearable antenna is to diminish the influence of frequency detuning and reduces the backward radiation specifically when loaded on the human body. The overall size of the presented antenna incorporated with MTM is 60 x 60 x 2.4 mm3. Furthermore, the integrated design has the capability of controlling Specific absorption rate (SAR) and improved the bandwidth, front-to-back ratio (FBR), and gain up to 14.5%, 13.7dB, and 7.5dBi, respectively. The operations under different bending diameters on real and modelled human body are studied. Compared with conventional antennas, MTM-inspired antennas reduce the SAR to safe levels of more than 90%. The presented integrated design can be a good candidate for incorporation into a variety of flexible systems for medical application.