IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

8, 2009

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Conformal Asymmetric Meandered Flare (AMF) Antenna for Body-Worn Applications

Dimitris Psychoudakis, Senior Member, IEEE, and John L. Volakis, Fellow, IEEE
AbstractA conformal body-worn antenna is presented for communications at 300 MHz. The antenna consists of a thin broadband ared-dipole element printed on a thin (0.1 mm) FR4 substrate without metallic backing or other shielding. The letter presents the design approach for tuning, matching, and mounting the antenna on the human body. Measurements are given for a human body phantom, and these are compared to simulations. Different antenna positions for improved coverage are also presented. Index TermsBody-worn antennas, conformal antennas, UHF Antennas, wearable antennas.

In this letter, we present a wearable antenna operating in the UHF band (300 MHz) that avoids use of the ground plane altogether. Moreover, the antenna is printed on a exible FR-4 substrate (0.1 mm thick) enabling ease of mounting conformal to the body. A human body phantom was also fabricated and used to verify gain and pattern performance. II. ANTENNA DESIGN The geometrical requirements for the subject antenna for UHF operation are: width 1.5 (3.8 cm), length ( 30 cm), and ultra thin (i.e. conformal to clothing and exible). The operating frequency should optimally be centered at 300 MHz for on-body deployment (ideally 280340 MHz for 10 dB). One antenna topology suitable for such return loss requirements is the printed dipole due to its conformal nature (it doesnt require multiple layers), simplicity, and ease of fabrication. There is a large selection of printed dipole shapes that could be considered. Among them are the bow-tie dipole and the most recently available are dipole [8]. The latter is 34.8 cm long 21.3 cm wide and operates from 250 MHz1.1 GHz. That is, this design is too large for the subject requirements outlined above. A length and width reduction for the are dipole is expected to reduce bandwidth, but since the original are dipole antenna has abundant bandwidth, we hope that the bandwidth after the reduction will still be satisfactory. However, the bodys presence could potentially alleviate the aforementioned bandwidth reduction. As is well known, the , body has a very high relative permittivity value implying miniaturization (viz. resonant frequency shift). On the other hand, since the body has losses, the bandwidth is likely to be retained. Of course, high losses imply lower efciency (unavoidable in any body-worn application). To start the design, we began with three 12 printed dipoles (see Fig. 1). These were simulated in free space and also when placed next to a lossy dielectric rectangular box with (equivalent ). The latter was intended to provide an appropriate emulation of the body muscle extracted from the Debye model referenced in [9]. We remark that the rightmost geometry in Fig. 1 is an asymmetric meandered are (AMF) dipole antenna and is an adaptation of the are dipole. Its advantage is that the top meandered section has additional inductance (due to meandering) for miniaturization. The bottom half is not meandered to allow the feeding cable to run along it until it reaches the feed location at the middle. In effect, the bottom half of the dipole serves as a balun. The loading effect of a lossy dielectric adjacent to the printed dipoles is depicted in Fig. 2. The free-space simulations imply that all three antennas in Fig. 1 have almost similar responses

I. INTRODUCTION

ODY-WORN antennas are of great interest due to the impending wireless applications. However, body-worn antennas are associated with several challenges due to their low gain and higher losses. Already, several papers present planar antennas fabricated on conductive textile material [1][6] for body-worn applications. These designs range from simple bodyworn patch antennas [1][3] to dual-band and broadband designs [4][6] with electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) substrates used in some cases [6]. A common theme in all these designs is overcoming the disadvantages of human proximity. In most designs, the radiating element is shielded from the body by employing a ground plane or an EBG backing. Such a ground plane aims to increase antenna efciency. However, this approach does not appear as effective since all reported wearable antennas have measured gains close to 10 dBi ([3] does show simulations with 5 dBi gain, but no measurements are given). Additionally, the ground plane backings shield off the radiating element from the high-permittivity substrate (emulated by the body). Moreover, such ground planes lead to low-impedance bandwidth. Therefore, it is desirable to eliminate the ground plane for increased miniaturization and higher bandwidths (for the same size antenna). Indeed, it was shown in [7] that without a ground plane, the body can be used to exploit miniaturization without signicantly reducing efciency and bandwidth. Additionally, by excluding the metallic backing, the antenna can be thinner and more exible.

Manuscript received May 19, 2009; revised June 18, 2009. First published July 31, 2009; current version published August 25, 2009. The authors are with The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43212-1191 USA (e-mail: dpsycho@ece.osu.edu; volakis@ece.osu.edu). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this letter are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LAWP.2009.2028662

1536-1225/$26.00 2009 IEEE

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 8, 2009

Fig. 1. 12 long applications.

215
:

wide printed dipole antennas suitable for body-worn

(except for the slightly increased bandwidth of the are). However, when a lossy dielectric body is placed 1 cm away from the antennas, the AMF dipole is effectively miniaturized due to its longer, meandering lower section. This observation suggests that the AMF dipole is a good candidate for body-worn applications. Furthermore, Fig. 2 suggests that a size increase of 18% would be necessary to attain a similar performance by the bow-tie or the are dipole antennas. Gain and pattern effects on the dipole performance will be examined in the next section when the human body phantom is employed. A. AMF Balun Length Having selected the AMF for body-worn radiation, we proceed to optimize its lower half (balun). As mentioned earlier, the feed cable for the AMF is routed over the lower arm and serves as a balun. Here, the balun is dened as the portion of the coaxial cables outer conductor that is in electrical contact (soldered) with the lower dipole arm (see Fig. 3). As shown in Fig. 3, the balun length, , was varied until the best matching was achieved. The measured return loss in absence of the body for ve balun length values is plotted and shown in Fig. 3. From these measurements, it is clear that the optimum (in terms of miniaturization) balun length is less than 3.4 cm for matching to the 50- cable.

Fig. 2. Simulated return loss, matched to 50

, of three printed dipole antennas in (top) free space and (bottom) 1 cm away from a dielectric body with " = 62 + j 55 (equivalent tan  = 0:89).

Fig. 3. Measured free-space return loss for different balun lengths, x (dened as the section of the cable attached to the lower half). The inset, on the left, shows a fabricated antenna prototype.

PSYCHOUDAKIS AND VOLAKIS: CONFORMAL AMF ANTENNA FOR BODY-WORN APPLICATIONS

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Fig. 5. Simulated and measured return loss curves for the AMF antenna placed at different distances from the human body model and phantom.

Fig. 4. (left) Human body FE-BI geometry used for simulations and (right) plastic human phantom used for measurements with antennas mounted on the upper body.

III. ON-BODY CHARACTERISTICS The AMF antenna performs best (as compared to the others) when placed near the body. Its performance was assessed via simulations and measurements of a plastic human phantom lled with liquid emulating human tissue. The antenna setup in presence of the human body is depicted in Fig. 4. The simulation model is shown to the left, and the measurement model to the right (representing a liquid-lled mannequin). The height of the human nite element model (FEM) was 180 cm, its width (shoulder to shoulder) was 46 cm, and its thickness (front to back) was 18 cm. The volume mesh was created for simulations using an in-house nite element-boundary integral (FE-BI) code presented in [10]. The human body phantom (see Fig. 4, right) was constructed from a retail plastic mannequin. The mannequins wall thickness varies between 38 mm and is made of plastic having . To emulate the human body, the mannequin was lled with a human-tissue-emulating liquid (leading to the pink tint of the and phantom seen in Fig. 4). The liquid had a measured at 300 MHz. This permittivity is slightly higher than . nominal (for human muscle), but has a slightly lower A. Impedance Matching The effect of the human body on input impedance and the return loss of the antenna depend signicantly on the distance of the antenna from the skin. This is especially true for distances between antenna and body on the order of 1 or less. Simulations were carried out to quantify this effect by varying

the distance of the antenna from the human model. Since the phantom model has a shell thickness that varies and the shape is not planar, this parametric study is undertaken using simulations. Only one measurement was done for a 1-cm gap between antenna and body, and this was done for validation (see Fig. 5). It is clear that the full bandwidth is not covered in this measuredB bandwidth is from 270320 MHz. ment as the dB bandwidth, we would need to To increase the increase the dipole width. However, this was prohibited due to size requirements. The effect of the distance from the body is demonstrated in the return loss curves in Fig. 5. It is clear that as the gap decreases, the resonant frequency shifts to lower values, but the bandwidth remains relatively unchanged. This is mainly due to the higher losses of the human body. B. AMF Dipole Efciency A major consequence of the presence of the human body is lower efciency (and gain). To evaluate the efciencies of the derived antenna, the antenna was mounted on the front of the torso, in the center of the chest area (see Fig. 4), and the boresight gain was estimated via simulations. From the curves in Fig. 6, it is evident that the closer the antenna comes to the body, the more prominent the losses become. In fact, the pattern experiences a 5-dB gain drop by moving the antenna from 1.5 to 0.25 cm away from the body. C. Radiation Pattern The radiation pattern is certainly affected by presence of the human body. Specically in Fig. 7, we note the appearance of nulls and a major lobe in both simulations and measurements. The agreement between simulations and measurements is noteworthy, especially since the two setup geometries have major differences (fewer details for the simulation geometry). Also observed is that the slight asymmetry in the gap between hands and the torso manages to tilt the measured beam toward the

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 8, 2009

Fig. 8. Antenna pattern measurements using two AMF antennas operated in common and differential modes.

V. CONCLUSION
Fig. 6. Simulated gain curves for the AMF antenna placed at specic distances from body surface.

An AMF antenna with balun was introduced for body-worn applications. The antenna was compared with alternative designs of same size, and body effects were addressed in carrying out the design. As expected, the antenna showed reduction in gain and deterioration in coverage due to human body effects. However, use of multiple antennas showed coverage improvement with simple sum and difference mode reception schemes. REFERENCES
[1] P. Salonen, Y. Rahmat-Samii, and M. Kivikoski, Wearable antennas in the vicinity of human body, in Proc. IEEE Antennas Propag. Soc. Int. Symp., Jun. 2004, vol. 1, pp. 467470. [2] P. Salonen and L. Hurme, A novel fabric WLAN antenna for wearable applications, in Proc. Antennas Propag. Soc.y Int. Symp., Jun. 2003, vol. 2, pp. 700703. [3] C. Hertleer, H. Rogier, L. Vallozzi, and L. Van Langenhove, A textile antenna for off-body communication integrated into protective clothing for reghters, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 919925, Apr. 2009. [4] T. Yang, W. Davis, and W. Stutzman, Wearable ultra-wideband halfdisk antennas, in Proc. IEEE Antennas Propag. Soc. Int. Symp., Jul. 2005, vol. 3A, pp. 500503. [5] P. Salonen, Y. Rahmat-Samii, H. Hurme, and M. Kivikoski, Dualband wearable textile antenna, in Proc. Antennas Propag. Soc. Int. Symp., Jun. 2004, vol. 1, pp. 463466. [6] S. Zhu and R. Langley, Dual-band wearable textile antenna on an EBG substrate, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 926935, Apr. 2009. [7] D. Psychoudakis, C.-C. Chen, and J. Volakis, Optimizing wearable UHF antennas for on-body operation, in Proc. Antennas Propag. Soc. Int. Symp., Jun. 2007, pp. 41844187. [8] S. Koulouridis and J. Volakis, Minimization of are dipole via shape optimization and matching circuits, in Proc. Antennas Propag. Soc. Int. Symp., Jun. 2007, pp. 47854788. [9] O. P. Gandhi, B. Q. Gao, and J. Y. Chen, A frequency-dependent nite-difference time-domain formulation for general dispersive media, IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 658665, Apr. 1993. [10] R. Kindt, K. Sertel, E. Topsakal, and J. Volakis, Array decomposition method for the accurate analysis of nite arrays, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 51, no. 6, pp. 13641372, Jun. 2003.

Fig. 7. Measured and simulated single antenna patterns with the AMF antenna mounted on the chest.

phantoms left. The cause of the off-center pattern was validated by removing the arms and remeasuring. IV. DUAL ANTENNA CONFIGURATION To alleviate the issue with pattern nulls, we considered two antennas connected via a hybrid. The hybrid can support two modes, a common mode where the signal from the two antennas is added in-phase and a differential mode for out-of-phase reception of the two signals. Fig. 8 shows the measured patterns for the above modes when one of the antennas is mounted on the back and the other on the chest, as before. The single antenna pattern is also plotted for comparison. It is not difcult to conclude that the common mode has improved coverage over the single antenna. Even more importantly, we see that the conguration of the common and differential modes alleviate reception failure altogether.