Theoretical Modeling and Design Guidelines for a New Class of Wearable Bio-Matched Antennas

We present theoretical modeling and design guidelines for bio-matched antennas (BMAs), an emerging class of wearable, into-body antennas that surpass the state of the art in terms of bandwidth and gain. In brief, BMAs are ultra-wideband, pyramid-shaped antennas that utilize the periodic combination of water and plastic to enhance performance. The new modeling enables customized performance for applications as diverse as radiometry, telemetry with implants, and more. Our studies utilize the comparison of the BMA to a conical antenna to model the low-frequency cutoff. In addition, we conduct a plane wave expansion method analysis of the engineered periodic dielectrics to 1) model the high-frequency cutoff of the BMA and 2) predict the permittivity of the bio-matched dielectric. Parametric studies are further pursued to assess transmission loss as a function of the BMA's height. We verify our design framework through a novel BMA that operates from 1 to 12 GHz with 21.4 dB of transmission loss through 3 cm of tissue at 2.4 GHz. Compared to the most wideband and most efficient into-body radiator previously reported, this has 6.2 dB less transmission loss, with the new design also exhibiting nearly twice as much bandwidth.