Inkjet-printed monopole antennas for enhanced-range WBAN and wearable biomonitoring application

Abstract

In this paper, a monopole antenna backed by an inkjet-printed electromagnetic band gap ground (EBG) plane on paper substrate is proposed for wearable applications with drastically enhanced communication range. This novel design approach for WBAN and wearable biomonitoring applications alleviates the on-body antenna's performance degradation, which may cause a significant degradation of the wireless system's performance as well. The communication range improvement compared to conventional antenna is demonstrated by using a benchmarking commercial wireless temperature sensor module. In addition, the advantages and the integrability of the proposed wearable antenna topology into mobile wireless on-body health care systems is discussed in detail.