Design and development of WBAN antennas for wireless health monitoring

Abstract

This project is about to design of a microstrip patch antenna on the nonconductive textile substrates at the operating frequency 2.45 GHz which is for wireless body area network (WBAN) application. There are certain fabric materials in the market that can be use to patch the microstrip antenna such as nora, felt, fleece and etc. Those fabric materials have relative permittivity characteristics that make it suitable for wearable antenna. The main objective of this project is to design, simulate, fabricate and analyze the microstrip patch antenna at frequency 2.45 GHz using textile as the substrate. The proposed fabric material for this project is felt fabric. The felt fabric is selected because it has constant thickness and stable relative permittivity. The 2.45 GHz unlicensed band is utilized for the development of this wearable antennas. The used of printed circuit boards (PCB) as the substrate in conventional antenna is not suitable for wearable system because of limited body movement problem. To overcome this problem is by changing PCB substrate with textile substrate. The simulation of the design can be carried out by using CST software.