An Effective Design of Wearable Antenna with Double Flexible Substrates and Defected Ground Structure for Healthcare Monitoring System

Due to the development of modern wearable mobile devices, the need of antenna with smaller size and internally flexible to fit becomes necessary. Miniaturization of Micro Strip Patch (MSP) antenna increases its employability for communication in different aspects. The use of flexible material for the fabrication of MSP antenna still improves its use for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) which includes devices for monitoring systems in military, surveillance and medical applications. The devices designed specifically in Industrial Scientific Medical (ISM) band are used for communication in these applications. Defected Ground Structure (DGS) is adopted as an emerging technique for improving the various parameters of microwave circuits, that is, narrow bandwidth, cross-polarization, low gain, and so forth. In this paper, the design of compact micro strip patch antenna using different flexible substrate materials with DGS is proposed to resonate the antenna at 2.45GHz ISM band which can be used as biomedical sensors. Felt and Teflon with dielectric constant 1.36 and 2.1respectively are chosen as flexible substrate material among various flexible materials like cotton, rubber, paper, jeans etc. Using CST studio suite software, the designed antenna is simulated and the fabricated antenna is tested with Vector Network Analyzer (VNA). The performance parameters like return loss, gain, directivity and Voltage Standing Wave Ratio (VSWR) of the antenna are analyzed.