Wearable Antennas for Remote Health Care Monitoring Systems

Abstract

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.

Fully-Textile, Wearable Chipless Tags for Identification and Tracking Applications

“…The NWCF was shaped by using a cutting plotter (model CraftROBO CE5000-40 disributed by Graphtec). The adoption of NWCFs allows to reduce the manufacturing costs in comparison to solutions based on electro-textiles or conductive threads [24][25][26]. In fact, NWCFs are generally less expensive and, most importantly, they do not fray.…”

“…While in [25], a chipless tag consisting of multiple L-shaped scatterers was investigated. This chipless tag could depolarize the incident wave and create a response in the orthogonal polarization; however, the experimental results reported in [25] refer to prototypes fabricated on a rigid substrate commonly used for PCB, and the extension of these results to fully-textile materials is not straightforward [15,26].…”

Dielectric Characterization of Non-Conductive Fabrics for Temperature Sensing through Resonating Antenna Structures

“…Furthermore, they are thin and have a low dielectric constant (ε r ) and therefore they are good candidates for flexible wearable antennas as dielectric substrates [26]. In addition to temperature sensing textile-based resonator can plays a key role in the development of a wide range of applications, such as sports analytics [27], healthcare [28], gaming [29], and emergency services [30].…”

Wearable Triband E-Shaped Dipole Antenna with Low SAR for IoT Applications

“…Nonstretchable denim fabric, which is strong, durable and normally made of a 100% cotton yarn, has been used as the substrate material for textile-based antennas [12,15]. Another type of dielectric substrate for wearable antennas is cellulose filter paper.…”