Compact On-Body Antennas for Wearable Communication Systems

This paper presents performance analysis of compact on-body antennas over a female body phantom. These antennas are designed to operate in 2.4GHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band. In the design process, full ground plane is used to minimize radiation towards the body as they are intended to operate in near-body scenarios for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). They offer significant advantages of compactness, light weight, wide radiation pattern over the body surface to provide maximum coverage, and less sensitivity to the variation of the gap between the antenna and the human body. These advantages make them of high interest for on-body communications and wearable applications. Results show that these antennas have good performance and successfully communicate under various near-body scenarios.

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