A wearable rectenna for operation in the ultra high frequency (UHF) band is presented. The proposed device consists of a compact patch antenna and a full-wave bridge rectifier, both fabricated with textile materials. The patch antenna has been realized by using an adhesive conductive fabric on a bi-layer substrate made of pile and jeans. As for the rectifier, it is on a layer of jeans on the back-face of the antenna. Experimental data referring both to the patch antenna and to the rectenna are reported and discussed. From measurements performed with an incident power density of 14 W/cm , it is demonstrated that the rectenna here presented exhibits a conversion efficiency higher than 20% over the frequency range 860-918 MHz with a maximum of about 50% at 876 MHz.

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Remote monitoring of the elderly in telehealth applications requires that the monitoring must not affect the elderly's regular habits. To ensure this requirement, the components (i.e., sensor and antenna) necessary to carry out such monitoring should blend in with the elderly's daily routine. To this end, an effective strategy relies on employing wearable antennas that can be fully integrated with clothes and that can be used for remotely transmitting/receiving the sensor data. Starting from these considerations, in this work, two different methods for wearable antenna fabrication are described in detail: the first resorts to the combined use of nonwoven conductive fabrics and of a cutting plotter for shaping the fabric, whereas the second considered fabrication method resorts to the embroidery of conductive threads. To demonstrate the suitability of the considered fabrication techniques and to highlight their pros and cons, numerical and experimental results related to different wearable antennas are also reported and commented on. Results demonstrate that the presented fabrication techniques and strategies are very flexible and can be used to obtain low-cost wearable antennas with performance tailored for the specific application at hand.