Design of a Cardiopulmonary Antenna for Vital Signs Monitoring Robust to Different Subjects

Abstract

With the advancement of wireless diagnosis and treatment technologies, antennas deployed close to the human body are now widely used. The use of on-body antennas, along with other technologies, presents itself as an innovative method for detecting and monitoring vital signs. These antennas can be attached directly on the body or on clothes, making it comfortable to use and less invasive when compared to conventional methods, allowing at-home monitoring of elderly patients or high risk workers with a single antenna. In this paper, a robust high bandwidth patch antenna was developed to operate in the dedicated Industrial, Scientific and Medical frequency band, namely at 2.45 GHz, capable of monitoring vital signs in any subject. This work presents the design and results of a robust cardiopulmonary antenna, to be further used to monitor the respiratory rate of five different subjects, each one with different physiognomy.