Novel and Compact Ultra-Wideband Wearable Band-Notch Antenna Design for Body Sensor Networks and Mobile Healthcare System

Abstract

The development and study of a novel and very miniaturized ultra-wideband (UWB) wearable band-notch antenna for body sensor networks (BSNs) and mobile healthcare system have been presented in this paper. A very user-friendly and reliable software Computer Simulation Technology (CST)TM Microwave Studio was used for the modeling and simulation purpose of this antenna. The antenna is a textile-based UWB notch antenna, as it was printed on jeans’ textile substrate. The simulated performance parameters, such as return loss, bandwidth, gain, radiation efficiency and radiation patterns of this antenna are demonstrated and analyzed. The main aim of this paper was to design a textile-based compact UWB antenna with the characteristics of band notch in X-band to reject the down link band (7.25 GHz–7.75 GHz) of satellite communication in the UWB frequency ranges of 3.1 to 10.6 GHz in order to avoid interference. The simulated results show that this antenna has very well band notch characteristics in the frequency range of 7.25–7.75 GHz. The overall dimension of the antenna is 25 mm in length and 16 mm in width, which is very compact. The antenna is printed on 1 mm Jeans’ textile with the dielectric constant of 1.7. This antenna shows very good results; it has compact size and is printed on textile material, and has band notch characteristics to avoid interference. Due to all these attractive characteristics, it will be a good candidate for body sensor networks for a mobile healthcare system.