2020 journal article

Compact, Low-Profile and Robust Textile Antennas With Improved Bandwidth for Easy Garment Integration

IEEE ACCESS, 8, 77490–77500.

co-author countries: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland 🇬🇧 United States of America 🇺🇸
author keywords: Microstrip antennas; Textiles; Microstrip; Permittivity; Bandwidth; Fabrication; Antenna; textile antennas; embroidered; screen printing; wearable application
Source: Web Of Science
Added: May 26, 2020

In this paper, a compact and low-profile proximity-fed textile-based antenna with robust performance and improved bandwidth is proposed for body-area network (BAN) applications. The employed proximity-fed antenna differs from traditional wearable antennas in the sense that it not only exhibits improved bandwidth but also a reduced footprint. The proposed antenna also possesses an extreme robustness when subject to structural deformation and human body loading effects. In addition, the impact of the uncertainty in the dielectric constant (a characteristic associated with most textile material systems) is investigated for the first time. Experimental results show that the proposed proximity-fed antenna outperforms wearable antennas that employ more conventional feeding methodologies. The antenna was fabricated using two different flexible textile-based material systems (i.e., one printed and one embroidered). The advantages and disadvantages of each fabrication approach are discussed. The proposed antenna is characterized in free-space and on a human body, yielding robust performance in both cases.