Prototypes of body worn microstrip patch antennas for biomedical applications operating in the ISM frequency band

Antennas for biomedical applications have become a prevalent technology in modern healthcare services. Disease prevention, sensoring and monitoring of medical issues and physiological data and minimal-invasive medical device application are just a few of the advantages of antenna usage. For this purpose a miniaturized and biocompatible antenna is needed. The aim of this project is to design and simulate a simple, versatile rectangular microstrip patch antenna with included meander structures, meeting the requirement of the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) frequency band (2.4 – 2.5 GHz) for biomedical application on human skin. Here the design of the antennas using a trial and error method executed with the computational electromagnetics software FEKO (Altair Engineering, Inc., Michigan, US) is shown. Furthermore a few preliminary antenna performance results are presented. The resulting microstrip patch antenna meets the requirements operating in the ISM frequency band and has a flexible and miniaturized design. Implications on the human body have to be simulated with a canonical phantom of the human skin in prospective steps.