Active textile antennas in professional garments for sensing, localisation and communication

Abstract

Abstract-New wireless wearable monitoring systems integrated in professional garments require a high degree of reliability and autonomy. Active textile antenna systems may serve as platforms for body-centric sensing, localization and wireless communication systems, in the meanwhile being comfortable and invisible to the wearer. New design strategies combined with dedicated signal processing techniques greatly enhance the robustness of these systems. On the one hand, the large amount of real estate available in public regulated services' garments may be exploited to deploy multiple textile antennas. On the other hand, the size of each radiator may be designed large enough to ensure high radiation efficiency when deployed on the body. This antenna area is then reused by placing active electronics directly underneath and energy harvesters directly on top of the antenna patch. We illustrate this design paradigm by means recent textile antenna prototypes integrated in professional garments, providing sensing, positioning and communication capabilities.

Design of a Multi-Band Microstrip Textile Patch Antenna for LTE and 5G Services with the CRO-SL Ensemble

“…Recent research works have allowed us to develop the design of antennas using textile materials in the substrate, leading to devices called "wearable antennas" [2]. One of the main advantages of the antennas based on textile materials is that they can be manufactured using smart fabric and interactive textile systems [3], in which unobtrusive integration of electronic components increases functionality of the garment [4,5].…”

Substrate integrated waveguide textile antennas as energy harvesting platforms

“…In this regard, several wearable electronic systems, unobtrusively integrated into the garment [1], were designed to enable remote monitoring of vital signs, activities and environmental parameters by wirelessly relaying these data to a remote location for supervision. However, a frequently heard complaint by the end users of such a smart fabric and interactive textile (SFIT) systems concerns the limited system autonomy [2].…”

Design of a Circularly Polarized Galileo E6-Band Textile Antenna by Dedicated Multiobjective Constrained Pareto Optimization

“…Smart fabrics and interactive textiles (SFIT) offer great potential to increase the functionality in a wide gamut of applications at a low cost, both in terms of price and space. From healthcare to civil services, by using suitable materials such as (conductive) textiles, foams, and 3D fabrics to realize active circuits and antennas, electronic systems can be unobtrusively integrated into clothing, implementing features that would otherwise require additional, often cumbersome, devices that have to be carried around [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. For rescue workers, having access to services such as positioning, victim localization, vital signs monitoring, and environmental hazard sensing can mean the difference between life and death.…”

“…Aperture-coupled circularly polarized patch antennas provide a versatile topology for wearable, robust userterminal antennas for satellite communications [1,2]. The intricate effect of the different design parameters on the antenna performance, combined with the variations on the applied substrate materials, demands a dedicated design strategy, employing a multiobjective optimization approach in tandem with a final postoptimization step to accommodate for potential variations in the foam/textile substrates.…”