Antennas for a body area network

Wireless data transmission is becoming very popular in medical applications. Wireless monitoring of vital functions is one of the evident aspects to make life easier and even safer in the hospital. The most mentioned second aspect is home care, where people can live in their familiar surroundings. This data transmission has been embedded in a body area network with distributed devices, which communicate with a belt-mounted gateway. The article describes two different antennas, which were designed for operation at 868 MHz close to the human body. A patch antenna on ceramic substrate with a high dielectric constant and a planar inverted F-antenna.