Compact Wearable Antennas Enabled by Artificial Ground Structures

This paper presents a review of recently developed compact single-band and dual-band linearly-polarized and circularly-polarized conformal antennas for body-area networks. By utilizing strongly-truncated anisotropic artificial ground structures, the form factor of the integrated antennas can be limited within a volume of $0.5\lambda_{0}$ by $0.5 \lambda_{0}$ by $0.05 \lambda_{0}$. As compared with conventional linearly-polarized and circularly-polarized patch antennas having the same form factor, the proposed antennas possess more robust performance metrics under structural deformation and human body loading. Experiments were performed to verify the proposed designs, particularly when they are mounted on a human body for off-body communications in a body-area network.