Screen Printed High Gain EBG-based Wearable Textile Antenna for Wireless Medical Band Applications

Abstract

A screen-printed wearable coplanar waveguide (CPW) fed semi-octagonal shaped antenna is developed on a denim textile substrate to resonate at 2.45 GHz for wireless medical body area network communications. The antenna is integrated with a circular ring-type electromagnetic bandgap structure (EBG) to mitigate performance degradation due to the high permittivity of the tissue model when it works on body conditions. The CPW antenna and EBG surfaces are fabricated using the screen-printing method, which provides good conformability, good wearable comfortability, and light weight. The proposed EBG integrated antenna has dimensions of 0.66λ × 0.66λ × 0.056λ and an impedance bandwidth of 13% (2.3-2.62 GHz) with a gain of 6.7 dB. The specific absorption rates (SARs) of the antenna are 0.309 W/kg and 0.14 W/kg for 1 g and 10 g of tissue, respectively, which are within the wearable safety limits. Thus, the fabricated prototype antenna is suitable for wearable WBAN and MBAN applications.