Active Compact Wearable Body Area Networks for Wireless Communication, Medical and IoT Applications

Abstract

The development of compact wearable antennas and transceivers for communication, IoT (Internet of Things), and biomedical systems will be presented in this paper. Development of Compact efficient wearable antennas is one of the major challenges in development of wearable communication, IoT, and medical systems. The main goal of wireless body area networks (BANs), WBANs, is to provide continuously medical data to the physician. Body area network (BAN) antennas should be flexible, lightweight, compact, and have low production cost. However, low efficiency is the major disadvantage of small printed antennas. Microstrip antennas resonant frequency is altered, due to environment conditions, different antenna locations, and different system operation modes. These disadvantages may be solved by using compact active and tunable antennas. A new class of wideband active wearable antennas for medical applications is presented in this paper. Amplifiers may be connected to the wearable antenna feed line to increase the system dynamic range. Small lightweight batteries supply the bias voltage to the active components. An active dual polarized antenna is presented in this paper. The active dual polarized antenna gain is 14 ± 3 dB for frequencies ranging from 380 to 600 MHz. The active transmitting dual polarized antenna output power is around 18 dBm. A voltage-controlled diode, varactor, may be used to control the antenna electrical performance at different environments. For example, an antenna located in patient stomach area has VSWR (Voltage Standing Wave Ratio) better than 2:1 at 434 MHz. However, if the antenna will be placed on the patient back, it may resonate at 420 MHz. By varying the varactor bias voltage, the antenna resonant frequency may be shifted from 420 to 434 MHz. An ultra-wideband passive and active printed slot antenna may be employed in wideband wearable communication systems. The active slot antenna gain is 13 ± 2 dB for frequencies from 800 MHz to 3 GHz.

Green Wearable Sensors for Medical, Energy Harvesting, Communication, and IoT Systems

“…The radiation efficiency of the antenna at 3.3 GHz is around 60% with 2.6 dBi directivity, and 0.8 dBi gain. Antennas such as patches, loops, and FIPA antennas have low efficiency [2][3][4][5][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. In communication and healthcare systems, the system polarization may be vertical, horizontal, or elliptical.…”

“…Measurements of wearable sensors are presented in [19]. Active antennas for communication, medical, and IoT devices are presented in [20]. As presented in [30] Wearable healthcare devices are used to increase disease cure and prevention.…”

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“…Wireless communications and networks became very important in our daily life services and applications including mobile, satellite, radar, sonar, and recent wireless networks such as the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and medical networks [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Therefore, it is essential to improve the performance of wireless communications, which requires enabling technologies and techniques to accommodate the large number of users and devices both in the current fifth generation (5G) and beyond systems and networks as well.…”