Dual-band wearable metallic button antennas and transmission in body area networks

A dual-band metallic antenna with the appearance of a button on a pair of jeans for use with wearable computer networks, emergency rescue scenarios and future wireless medical applications is presented. The design operates at 2.4 GHz WLAN and the HiperLAN/2 bands and a parametric study is given to aid the design process together with measurement and simulation of the structure on a body. A study of transmission between pairs of on-body antennas is presented to give insight into on-body propagating line of sight and non-line of sight channels. A term 'body gain' is defined to quantify how the body attenuates the channel.