On-body textile monopole antenna characterisation for body-centric wireless communications

Abstract

In this paper, the on-body performance of a light-weight and simple structure textile monopole antenna was investigated by determining reflection coefficient and bandwidth characteristics at 2.45 GHz. ShieldIt Super with conductivity of 1:96 × 10 5 S/m, is used as a conductive textile. The investigation of textile monopole antenna is carried out in the vicinity of human body, simulated by using HUGO model in CST Microwave Studio software, defined at a 8 × 8 × 8mm 3 voxel resolution. The distance of the antenna placed on human shoulder was varying between 0 and 15 mm. The investigation was aimed to study the changes in textile antenna's characteristics in terms of frequency detuning, bandwidth and reflection coefficient characteristics when the antenna was placed on the human body. The result showed that the reflection coefficient values were improved by 70.8% with a gradual enhancement of downward frequency shift as the textile monopole was varying between 0 and 15 mm. The result also demonstrated that an improvement up to a maximum of 72.8% in bandwidth was obtained when the textile monopole was positioned in the range of 2 to 15mm away from the human shoulder.