Research of Wearable Textile Antennas for WBAN Applications

Abstract

The emergence of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) in recent times has diverted the attention of most researchers towards the field of wearable antennas. The WBAN has enabled communication between different devices by placing them on human body. This work is a review which intends to disclose the recent developments in the area of wearable Textile antennas for WBAN. Further the use of different textile materials has been studied and their performances have been evaluated. The results show that use of textile materials have not only increased the efficiency but also they are very flexible and make the antenna suitable for on/off body applications such as medical and military. The properties of antennas inside human body, on human body and finally at some distance from the human body have been studied. It has been noted that as the distance between human body and antenna reduces, the properties of antenna such as efficiency, directivity and gain degrade more and more. Also the resonant frequency of antenna shifts from its original position which is a very big issue and needs to be rectified. For textile materials the shift in resonant frequency is not too much and also the degradation in other properties of antenna such as efficiency, directivity and gain are insignificant.