Antenna Test & Measurement Society (ATMS India-18)
Design of Wearable Antenna for Varous Applications
Satish K. Jain, Nilesh Baviskar, Nikita Golait, Shubha Jain
Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering
S.G.S. Institute of Technology and Science, Indore, (M.P.) 452003, India
satishjain.jain@gmail.com, nlesh.baviskar022@gmail.com, nikitagolait24@gmail.com, shubhajain@gmail.com
Abstract—In the proposed research work, wearable antenna
design strategy through CST simulator software has been
presented. This antenna is suitable for various applications
depending on =he bands like L, S, C and X with linear and
circular polarization characteristics. Simplest possible patch
geometry has been chosen along with easily available fabric
material as a dielectric surface in order to design these antennas.
In this way economical aspect will be maintained with the
designers prospective. Since antennas will be on the human
body, therefore bending performance has been evaluated as per
the different physique structure and condition. The designed and
developed antenna has been fabricated in the laboratory,
experimentally measured and tested for various performance
parameters like reflection coefficient, and input impedance.
Keywords—wearable antennas; circular polarization;
computer simulation technology; reflection coeffcient
I. INTRODUCTION
As per the current scenario, researchers are shifting their
focus towards wearable antennas design and analysis. The
wearable antenna is one of the key components in order to
establish body area network (BAN) for wireless
communication. Wearable antennas are being applied
successfully in various part of life such as health monitoring,
physical training, navigation, RFID, medicine, military etc.
Considering the easily available flexible textile as a dielectric
material, the cost of the antennas becomes very low. Also
development of the planar technology has boosted the research
in his particular domain. Since microstrip antennas are planar
in nature, are able to maintain low profile and easily
conformal to the object, therefore they are most suitable
candidate for designing wearable antennas.
Authors have attempted wearable antennas design for
medical applications like bio signal monitoring applications
[1], Tele-Medicine applications [2], Skin Cancer detection [3],
for bio-information applications [4]. In [1] authors presented
a simple approach to design a wearable antenna for smart
clothing in the ISM or bluetooth frequency band using HFSS
electromagnetic software and tested after fabrication. Smart
cloths have been used in order to monitor vital parameters
like bio- signals of patients or soldiers. In [2] a low cost and
easy to integrate flexible wearable antenna has been designed
on fabrics such as cotton, jeans and silk to be applied in ISM
frequency band of 2.4-2.4875 GHz. The HFSS simulator was
used for design. In [3], author proposed a design approach for
high gain wearable metamaterial antenna to be applied for
cancer detection. The wide band antenna designed is able to
6th & 7th Feb, 2018
mimic the electrical properties of the human skin. The
proposed antenna operating in the X-band (8-12 GHz) allows
sensing of varying differences in dielectric properties of
human skin tissues, therefore able to detect skin cancer. The
proposed antenna resonates at 11.72 GHz and consists good
amount of gain (10.9dBi). Similarly authors in [4] presented
an study report of wearable antenna design, which can be used
for medical applications. Also two antennas having
rectangular patch with resonating frequency of 2.4 GHz were
simulated using a electromagnetic software; on FR4 substrate
as well as on soft textile material. The bending performance of
the soft textile antenna was also investigated in this work.
Few authors have attempted wearable antenna concepts in
wireless communication field [5-8]. Like in [5], rectangular
wearable patch antenna having partial ground has been
proposed working at 2.4 GHz frequency suitable for WLAN
band applications. This antenna was fabricated on denim
substrate and performances under bent condition were
estimated. The measured result was compared with simulated
results and good agreement achieved was shown. In [6],
author proposed a miniaturized wearable textile substrate
patch antennas. In this current state of the art of wearable
antenna development has been reviewed extensively, focusing
on design and analysis issues. In order to examine the
performance of a rectangular microstrip antenna fabricated on
various textile substrates, these were designed and simulated.
A method is proposed to reduce the antenna size by
approximately 68%. In [7], a wearable dual-band dielectric
patch antenna has been proposed which are suitable for
Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) 4G Long-Term
Evolution (LTE) and the Wireless Local Area Network
(WLAN) communication applications. The patch antenna was
constructed from multi-walled carbon nano-tubes (MWCNT)
ink with electrical conductivity of 2.2 ×104 S/m and relative
permittivity of 5-j1. Design simulation and optimization
processes were carried out using ADS simulator based on
MoM numerical technique. In [8], a compact wearable harmes
paris logo shaped wearable antenna has been proposed, which
can be applied for ISM frequency multiband having centre
frequencies at 2.41GHz, 3.1GHz and 3.7GHz. A wearable
antenna with tripolarization diversity capability has been
proposed in [9] working at 2.4 GHz frequency band. An
inductive loaded circular monopolar patch with a microstrip
annular ring has been combined in order to realize the
tripolarization. Simulated and measured results have been
achieved to show a sufficient bandwidth for WBAN
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 Antenna Test & Measurement Society (ATMS India-18)

application. Similarly few attempt has been done by few L  Leff  2L ( 4)
researchers [10-12]. Authors discussed challenges of wearable
antenna design, activity about wearable microstrip patch
antenna design and simulation and evaluated SAR impact on Step 5:- The feed point position for 50 ohms can be calculated
jeans wearable antennas. using the following expression.

II. GEOMETRICAL DISCRIPTION Rin ( y  y 0 )  Rin ( y  0) cos 2 ( y0 ) (5)
L
In order to propose the concept of wearable antenna, an
inset fed rectangular microstrip patch antenna has been
designed, developed and simulated using CST software. A
geometry of the inset-fed microstrip patch antenna is well
known to microwave community so we opted that in our
research work. Basically it consists an dielectric layer having
suitable shape copper patch on the upper layer and copper
ground plane at lower surface. The patch antenna geometry
can be fed by any means like coaxial connector, edge (inset) y0 y0
feed connector, proximity coupling or aperture feed coupling.
However we have preferred an inset-feed approach to feed the
patch through microwave source. The reason behind it is its
added advantages over other techniques of feeding. Through
hit-and-trial approach, all the geometrical dimensional
parameters have been estimated like length (L), width (W),
length of feed line (w), inset feed dimensions like inset slot
length (Sl), slot width (y0), length other than slot (l), and
microstrip line feed width (Sw) etc. The proposed geometry Fig. 1. Proposed inset fed antenna
of the inset fed microstrip patch antenna is shown in Fig. (1). top view.
In order to realize wearable antenna in microwave laboratory,
we have chosen denim gens dielectric fabric with parameters; The geometrical optimized dimensional parameters values
dielectric constant εr = 1.6, thickness of the material; h = 0.7 are listed in the Table 1.
mm., although other material can also be tested depending on
the desired performance from wearable antenna exposed to
different environmental conditions [13]. The following steps TABLE I. OPTIMIZED GEOMETRICAL PARAMETERS
and relations have been used to get the geometrical parameters Variable
of the antenna working within 1 GHz-10 GHz (L, S, C and X S.N. Parameters
Symbol Values
band)
1 Length of substrate L1 120 mm
Step 1 :- calculate the width of patch using the formula:- 2 Width of substrate W1 120 mm
3 Length of patch L 30 mm
4 Width of patch W 40 mm
1 2 v 2 5 Length of feed line w 46 mm
W  0 (1) 6 Length of inset slot Sl 10 mm
2 f r  0 0  r  1 2 fr  r  1 7 Width of slot y0 12 mm
8 Length other than slot l 10 mm
9 Width of Microstrip line feed Sw 1.88 mm
Where fr is the resonance frequency, εr is the dielectric
constant of gens, v0 is the velocity of light in air.
Step 2:- Calculate the effective Dielectric constant εeff. For
(W/h»1) III. IMPLEMENTATION THROUGH SIMULATOR
1
In order to design wearable antenna to work within 1 GHz-
 r  1  r 1  h 2
10 GHz, computer simulation technology (CST) software tool
 eff   1  12  W  (2)
2 2 has been used. A 50 mm wide copper tape (length
approximately 5 meter) was used to develop metallic patch as
Step 3:- Calculate the length correction due to fringing well as metallic ground plane. Denim Gens fabric having
thickness h (= t = 0.7 mm) was selected in order to use it as
dielectric material. The parameters of the antenna along with
L (e ff  0.3) (Wh  0.264) the piece of gens cloth are listed in Table 1. With the help
 0.412  (3) of geometrical parameter values, a inset fed microstrip patch
h (e ff  0.258) (W  0.8)
h antenna geometry layout was drawn in CST fixing working
plane. After the geometry was drawn, the range of frequency
Step 4:- The length of the patch can now be calculated as (1 GHz- 10 GHz) was set and required boundary condition
was imposed. The waveguide port creation activity was

6th & 7th Feb, 2018 2 Pune, India


accomplished, in order to feed design inset feed antenna. With
the help of field monitor, a far field calculation was done
while simulating geometry. At last, the transient solver based
on the time domain calculation was forced to execute the
simulation. Before that, 201 frequency points were selected
within allocating frequency range, and then finally simulation
was performed. The geometrical layout for the simulation is
shown in the Fig. 2. The three dimensional gain plot is shown
in Fig. 3. From the figure an amount of gain obtained is 6.49
dBi, which is very good required for practical antenna.
Fig. 2. CST layout of wearable antenna
Finally, complete content and organizational editing before
Fig. 3. 3-d gain plot of wearable antenna
IV. RESULTS DISCUSSION AND EXPERIMENTATION
The performance of proposed antenna has been analysed
using reflection coefficient plot (Fig. 4). From the plot the
resonating frequency can be easily observed within said
Fig. 4. Wearable antenna performance plot.
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Antenna Test & Measurement Society (ATMS India-18)
frequency range (1 GHz-10 GHz). Proposed wearable antenna
simulated in CST software is has been bent through some
angle and results were observed through the reflection
coefficient plots. It was required as wearable antenna is
wearable by any human being having different size of wrist,
thigh etc. It was required that after wearing antenna on the
body, its performance must not alter. For that parametric
performance analysis was done. From the combined reflection
coefficient plots (Fig. 5), it’s very much clear that,
performance remains almost same. Input impedance plot of
the plain inset-fed microstrip patch antenna is shown in Fig. 6.
From the plot, it is clear that resonating frequency loops are
well within the VSWR=2 circle.
Fig. 5. Wearable antenna performance for
different bending angle.
10 GHz
1 GHz
Fig. 6. Input impedance plot on smith chart.
.
The plain microstrip patch antenna has been fabricated in the
laboratory with the help of copper tape and gens fabric.
Measurement for the performance has been accomplished with
the help of Rhode and Swartz, (ZVH) vector network analyser
(VNA). The prototype of inset-fed microstrip patch antenna
developed is shown in the Fig. 7. The ground plane view is
shown in Fig. 8. The laboratory set up of reflection coefficient
measurement using vector network analyser is also shown in
the Fig. 9. The measured reflection coefficient plot of the
fabricated antenna is shown in the Fig. 10. From the
comparison of plot of Fig. 4, with Fig. 10, it can be easily
observed that the performance of the measured antenna is very
much closer to the simulated one.
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Fig. 7. Photo of fabricated wearable antenna.
Fig. 8. Photo of fabricated wearable antenna
ground plane view.
Fig. 9. Photo of fabricated wearable antenna
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Antenna Test & Measurement Society (ATMS India-18)
Fig. 10. Measured reflection coefficient plot
of plain wearable microsrtrip patch antenna
V. CONCLUSION
An idea of flexible antenna embedded on wearable cloth
has been presented. Antenna has been simulated and
fabricated in the microwave laboratory and experimentally
measured. Antenna has been simulated within 1 GHz-10 GHz
frequency range in order to make it versatile with respect o
various band within allocated range of frequency. The
simulated and experimentally measured antenna performance
has been compared, in order to validate the concept. The
measured results are well within the expectations. Though a
fabric “denim gens” has been used as a dielectric material,
however other fabric can also be tried like cotton, silk,
polycot, polyester etc. Only classical geometry has been
tested for the patch antenna, depending on the applications
other shape can also be tried. The input impedance behaviour
of the antenna also has been studied through the smith char
plot.
Acknowledgment
The authors of this paper are very much thankful to the
Department of Electronics and Telecommunication
Engineering and institute S.G.S.I.T.S. Indore (MP) India, for
supporting this research activity all the way.
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