A Compact, Low-Profile Fractal Antenna for Wearable On-Body WBAN Applications

Ali Arif, Muhammad Zubair, Mubasher Ali, Muhammad Umar Khan, Muhammad Qasim Mehmood

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

237 Scopus citations

Abstract

A compact and low-profile wearable antenna is presented for on-body wireless body area network (WBAN) applications. The proposed triangular patch antenna is designed using low-cost widely available vinyl polymer-based flexible substrate. The final antenna topology is obtained by the combination of the Koch fractal geometry, meandering slits, and defected ground structure, to achieve a novel hybrid structure with compact footprint, good structural conformability, and enhanced impedance bandwidth (BW) to operate in the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical band with center frequency at 2.45 GHz. The fabricated prototype of the antenna has shown a good agreement between numerical and experimental results. In comparison to state-of-the-art prototypes, our design has more compact form factor of 0.318λo × 0.318λo × 0.004λo, along with 7.75% impedance BW, a peak gain of 2.06 dBi, and overall radiated efficiency of 75%. For the assessment of a specific absorption rate (SAR) performance of our design, it is tested on realistic heterogeneous HUGO voxel model. Both numerical and experimental investigations revealed extremely good robustness to both human body loading and structural deformation, making it an ideal candidate for flexible and body-worn devices.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)981-985
Number of pages5
JournalIEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters
Volume18
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - May 1 2019
Externally publishedYes

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