A smart wearable textile array system for biomedical telemetry applications

Abstract

A smart wearable textile array system (SWTAS) with direction of arrival (DoA) estimation and beamforming is proposed and developed for biomedical telemetry applications. This conformal system enables effective and continuous patient monitoring when combined with one or more health sensors, as information about the subject's health condition is received adaptively to guarantee link reliability. This operation is facilitated by a receiver front-end and a digital baseband beamforming network, which enables scalability and flexibility. The proposed SWTAS also features flexible antenna arrays made using textiles, which are arbitrarily located on a cylindrically shaped body phantom to ensure wide spatial DoA estimation capability. Besides being designed to suit on-body placement, the system performance is also characterized for on-body usage using a commercial body-emulating liquid, and placed at a realistic distance from the body, considering user clothing. Investigation indicated a good performance in the system's 80 forward plane with a DoA accuracy of 3 . Finally, a practical evaluation is presented using two transmitters placed at distinct locations and distances. The system successfully estimated both DoAs and received the telemetry signals using beamforming.Index Terms-Antenna arrays, biomedical communication, biomedical monitoring, biomedical telemetry, conformal antennas, direction of arrival (DoA) estimation, smart antennas.

Wearable Wireless Health Monitoring: Current Developments, Challenges, and Future Trends

“…In addition to that, biosensors used in current wearable systems are generally large and may require very specific on-body placement or body postures to provide reliable measurements. The latter may be solved using smart wearable antenna systems as proposed in [64]. Further improvements in textile sensors design and miniaturization and data acquisition techniques are required to appropriately address these shortcomings.…”

Design and implementation of a multi sensors self sustainable wearable device

“…There are many examples of proposed and deployed systems that attempt to exploit wearable devices with sensors to cover health care applications [4]- [7] [21]. In [4] the authors present a wireless device for vital sign monitoring, while [5] comments the benefits of wearable sensors devices for smart home and health care and wearable sensors for biomedical telemetry is discussed in [6]. All these solutions use multiple sensors and wireless connectivity, but they do not focus on the low power managements and low power design.…”

A CPW Fed Denim Based Wearable Antenna With Dual Band-Notched Characteristics for Uwb Applications

“…These antennas have gained much attention due to their robustness, small profile, flexibility, simple design, light weight, ease of integration into the garments, and its sustainable optimum performance [2,3]. Because of these advantages, wearable textile antennas have a wide range of applications in the area of medical stream [3][4][5], public safety [6], emergency rescue systems [7], navigation [8], entertainment, aeronautics, tracking a person in defense and mining [9,10] and have also found a solution for the implementation of wireless body area network (WBAN) [2,[11][12][13], on-offbody [14][15][16][17], and Body Centric wireless communications (BCWC) [18][19][20]. In open literature, several topologies have been presented for the development of the wearable textile antennas which include 3D printing technology [21,22], PIFA [11,23,24], IIFA [25], Substrate Integrated Waveguide technology (SIW) [14,16,26,27], aperture coupled [28,29], microstrip patch [16,17], CPW fed [2,21,30,31], EGB based [4,32,33], meta material based…”