Investigation of on-Body Antenna Performance Using Motion Capture Technique and Statistical Analysis

Abstract

The field of wireless body area networks (WBANs) has seen growing interest in recent years due to applications of wearable devices, such as in healthcare. Effective on-body antenna design is necessary to provide optimal performance in real-world scenarios. This study compares several wearable antenna types, which are monopole, patch, and e-textile antennas, to determine how human body motion affects antenna performance using a human body phantom model and human volunteers. Monopole antenna overall outperforms the patch antenna at 915 MHz and the e-textile antenna at 2.45 GHz, and a Weibull distribution can be used as a probability distribution for S 21 during an arm swing motion for all antenna types tested.