Flexible Antennas for Wearable Technologies

Abstract

Having the merits of being light-weight, energy efficient, in addition to low manufacturing cost, reduced fabrication complexity, and the availability of inexpensive flexible substrates, flexible and wearable technology is being established as an appealing alternative to the conventional electronics technologies which are based on rigid substrates. Furthermore, wearable antennas have been a topic of interest for more than the past decade, and hundreds of scientific papers can be found on the subject. This large number of publications asks for some classification in order to get an overview of the trends and challenges. To this aim, an overview of antennas for wearable technologies is proposed. This chapter is organized into three major sections. In the first part, a detailed review of wearable antennas is presented. The second part of this project deals with the flexible antennas parameters and families. Materials and fabrication methods are discussed in the third part. Wearables advantages, disadvantage and challenges are summarized in the last section.