Miniaturized Wearable Fractal Patch Antenna for Body Area Network Applications

Abstract

This article presents the design of a miniaturized wearable patch antenna to be utilized for the body area network (BAN) applications. To reduce the size of the antenna a crown fractal geometry antenna design technique has been adopted, and which resulted in a size reduction of 26.85%. Further, the polyester cloth has been used as the substrate of the antenna to make the proposed antenna a flexible one, and suitable for wearable biomedical devices. The designed antenna functions for the 2.45 GHz ISM band and has the gain and bandwidth of 4.54 dB and 131 MHz respectively, covering the entire ISM band. The antenna characteristics like return loss (S11), directivity and radiation pattern have been simulated and analyzed. Specific absorption rate (SAR) and front to back ratio (FBR) of the proposed antenna at the human body tissue model (HBTM) in the planer and different bending conditions of the antenna have also simulated and analyzed, and the proposed antenna fulfils the desired design standards.

Keywords

• biomedical
• body area network
• conformal
• fractal
• wearable antenna