Design of UWB Wearable Conformal Antenna for Body Area Networks

In this paper, a wearable ultra-wideband (UWB) micro-strip antenna is designed to meet the demand for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). This is a wearable textile antenna, which was formed on a jeans fabric substrate to reduce surface-wave losses. The single-fed circular strip monopole antenna provides good impedance matching over the entire UWB frequency range of 2.9∼10.6 GHz. The dielectric constant εr 2.2, and the loss tangent tan δ 0.04 of the jean substrates are measured by using the coaxial ring method. The proposed antenna consists of an improved circular radiation patch with the defective ground structure to expand the frequency band of the antenna and improve the radiation characteristics of the antenna with small dimensions of 20 × 30 × 1.4 mm3. In addition, structural deformation of the proposed antenna is performed to analyze the flexibility of the proposed antenna. The simulated SAR values follow the FCC limit, making it most suitable for wearable applications.