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Microw Opt Technol Lett. 2017;59:21472155. https://
doi.org/10.1002/mop.30698
Received: 23 February 2017
DOI: 10.1002/mop.30690
Dual band wristband antenna
with metal frame loaded for
biomedical applications
Zhu Duan1 | Li-Jie Xu2,3
1
Research Center of Applied Electromagnetics, Nanjing University of
Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044,
Peoples Republic of China
2
Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Wireless Communications,
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications,
Nanjing 210003, Peoples Republic of China
3
State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, Southeast University,
Nanjing 210096, Peoples Republic of China
Correspondence
Zhu Duan, Research Center of Applied Electromagnetics,
Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology,
Nanjing 210044, Peoples Republic of China.
Email: duanz@nuist.edu.cn
Funding information
This work was supported by the Startup Foundation for Introducing Talent
of NUIST (2243141501039), in part by the Natural Science Foundation of
Jiangsu Province (BK20160917) and in part by Open Research Program of
State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves of Southeast University
(K201728).
| 2155
Abstract
This letter proposes a dual band wristband antenna for
biomedical monitoring applications. With a metal frame
loaded, the lower resonant frequency can be pushed fur-
ther. Additionally, by adopting an umbrella-shaped
radiating part and a notched ground, the bandwidth can be
greatly enhanced. Finally, by properly rotating the protrud-
ing stubs of the central ground and coupling them to the
metal frame, the resonant frequency can be adjusted to the
desired ranges at 2.45 and 5.8 GHz Industrial Scientific
and Medical (ISM) band. The proposed antenna can be
intended for application where simultaneous telemetry
with implanted device as well as external base station is
required. The simulated and measured bandwidths on
wrist are 6.1%, 7.0% at 2.45 GHz and 44.3%, 53.6% at
5.8 GHz, making it robust enough to withstand the fre-
quency shift brought by tissue in close proximity.
KEYWORDS
metal frame, notched ground, wearable antenna, wristband antenna, ISM
band
1 | INTRODUCTION
With the fast development of processing capability of inte-
grated circuits and gradual miniaturization of physiological sen-
sors, future healthcare modules can be integrated into wearable
devices, and a wristband device with constant monitoring of
physiological parameters, such as glucose level and blood pres-
sure is quite promising. For patient with an implanted device,1,2
a wearable repeater device which can greatly enhance the com-
munication distance between the implant and an external base
station is a preferable choice.3,4 This is caused by the fact that
the repeater antenna can act as a relay component, communicat-
ing simultaneously with the implanted antenna and the external
one. In this case, often the lower frequency is intended for com-
munication with the implanted device due to its better penetra-
tion capability into the tissue, while the upper frequency is used
for external telemetry with monitoring devices. Therefore, dual
band operation is often required for repeater antenna.
On the other hand, due to the limited space confined by
wristband device, an effective way of enlarging the radiation
aperture is to make full use of the metal frame, which also
acts as the structure outline for the wristband device. This
trend can be clearly seen in the recent development of perso-
nal digital devices, in which metal frame has been adopted
for tablets,57 mobile phones810 and smartwatch case.11
However, when applied to wearable scenarios, their narrow
bandwidths cannot ensure the stability of antenna perform-
ance when applied on different human beings.
2156 | DUAN AND XU

F I G U R E 2 The simulation environment for the antenna and its

conceptual application. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.
com]

proposed antenna is only 17 mm, similar to a medium-sized

F I G U R E 1 The schematic of the antenna structure. [Color figure can
be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
Considering the two issues mentioned above, a wearable
device for biomedical monitoring purposes should be able to
operate at dual band and possess large bandwidth for stabil-
ity. Therefore in this letter, a dual band repeater antenna
adopting full metal frame with wide-band capability is pro-
posed for wristband application. It occupies a planar area of
only p 3 172 (908) mm2, much smaller than the previous
metal frame antenna sized at 40 3 50 (2000) mm2 operating
at a single band of 2.45 GHz for Bluetooth device.11 The
proposed antenna is designed to communicate with the
implanted device through 2.45 GHz ISM band and further
transmit the physiological signals to a remote monitoring
station through 5.8 GHz ISM band.
2 | ANTENNA STRUCTURE
watch, which makes it a good candidate for biomedical mon-
itoring wristband devices in the future.
The simulation environment for the antenna and its con-
ceptual application are presented in Figure 2. The model rep-
resenting the tissue is a single layer bone material with
frequency dependent dielectric properties from Ref. [12],
which are imported into the simulation model constructed in
Ansys High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS). As
shown in the figure, the antenna is place 5 mm above the
bone model to avoid conducting effect brought by the human
tissue in direct contact. For the optimization of the antennas
performance, it is executed by HFSS 15.0, and the optimized
geometrical parameters of the antenna together with the
dimension of the bone model used in the simulation are
listed in Table 1.
3 | DESIGN ANALYSIS
To illustrate the working principle, two antenna variations
are given in Figure 3. Labelled as case 1, the interior struc-
ture of the antenna is developed from a monopole, and the

As shown in Figure 1, the antenna is fabricated on Rogers T A BL E 1 Geometrical parameters of the proposed antenna and
4350B (Er 5 3.66, tand 5 0.004) with a substrate thickness simulation setup
of 30 mil (0.762 mm). The antenna structure is symmetric Parameter Value Parameter Value
with respect to x-axis, with the interior metal part on the sub-
strate spaced 1 mm from the external circular metal frame, w1 1 mm l2 8 mm
which is made of stainless steel with a thickness of 1 mm. w2 1 mm l3 34 mm
The interior part of the antenna on the substrate is modified
w3 1.4 mm ag1 5 deg
from a monopole. In the top view, we can see that the lower
radiating part is an umbrella-shaped strip, placed on the bot- w4 2.5 mm ag2 6 deg
tom layer of the substrate, while the top layer is composed of l1 14 mm U 10 deg
a notched circular ground with two protruding stubs placed
symmetrically with respect to x-axis. H 4 mm T 0.762 mm
The metal frame is wrapped around the antenna sub- l4 60 mm l5 30 mm
strate, and from the side view we can see that its height is
l6 60 mm D 5 mm
4 mm. For the final optimized design, the radius of the
DUAN AND XU
FIGURE 3 Antenna variations and the comparison of reflection coefficient. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
circular ground with protruding stubs is colored in orange
while the radiation strip is colored in green. To enhance the
antenna bandwidth, the rectangular strip is replaced with an
umbrella-shaped one, labelled as case 2. For the final pro-
posed antenna, an additional notch sized at 2.5 mm 3
1.5 mm is cut from the circular ground, which can be seen
clearly in Figure 1. These two antenna variations and the
comparison of their simulated reflection coefficients with the
proposed one are also presented in Figure 3. By comparing
case 2 with case 1, we can see that the umbrella-shaped strip
improves the matching significantly at 2.45 GHz. When case
2 is further compared with the proposed case, we can see
that the introduced notch from the ground further helps
improving the matching at 5.8 GHz.
Apart from the modification of the radiating strip and the
circular ground for better impedance matching, we can also
split the protruding stub connected with the circular ground
into two stubs, and the proper choosing of the rotation angle
u from along x-axis can further improve the antenna per-
formance. Figure 4 shows the comparison of reflection
FIGURE 4 The comparison of reflection coefficient with u
variation
| 2157
coefficients with different u values, and it indicates that the
splitting together with the proper rotation of the protruding
stub not only decreases the lower resonant frequency to be
around 2.45 GHz ISM band, but also improves the matching
at 5.8 GHz.
Based on the two modification methods mentioned
above, the final optimized design achieves a simulated band-
width of 6.1% and 44.3% at two resonant bands, respec-
tively. The achieved bandwidth at 2.45 GHz ISM band is
similar with the previous research.11 However, the planar
size of the proposed antenna (908 mm2) in this letter is much
smaller than the previous one (2000 mm2). Additionally, its
additional operation at 5.8 GHz with large bandwidth of
more than 2500 MHz makes it a good candidate for large
data communication with far field monitoring devices.
4 | MEASUREMENT RESULTS
Figure 5 shows the fabricated antenna and the measurement
setup. To minimize the effect of the metallic SMA (SubMinia-
ture version A) connector soldered to the relatively small
antenna and to ensure easier measurement, a rigid cable with
F I G U R E 5 The fabricated antenna and its measurement setup.
[Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
2158 | DUAN
FIGURE 6 The comparison of simulated and measured reflection
coefficient
F I G U R E 7 The simulation setup of two-port system. [Color figure
can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
50 X characteristic impedance is soldered to the center feeding
part. The measurement of the reflection coefficient is performed
by Rhode & Schwarz ZNB 20, and the 5 mm separation dis-
tance between the bottom of the antenna and the wrist surface
is ensured by a thin layer of foam. Figure 6 shows the compari-
son of simulated and measured reflection coefficients of the
FIGURE 8 S parameters of near field coupling at 2.45 GHz
AND XU
FIGURE 9 The comparison of far field radiation pattern at 5.8 GHz
antenna on the wrist. As shown in the figure, the measured
bandwidth is 7.0% and 53.6% at 2.45 and 5.8 GHz respectively,
which matches quite well with the simulated result.
As the lower frequency is intended for near-field teleme-
try with internal device, we evaluate the coupling strength
between the wearable antenna and an implanted dipole oper-
ating at 2.45 GHz. The simulation setup is shown in Figure
7, where the internal antenna represented by a standard
dipole is imbedded 3 mm below the surface of the bone
model. The dipole is designed to be matched to 50 X and fed
by a lumped port. Figure 8 shows the simulated S parameters
of the two-port system, which indicates that both the weara-
ble antenna and the implanted antenna are perfectly matched
at 2.45 GHz and a maximum |S21| of 28 dB can be achieved.
Also we found that with an implanted depth changing from
1 to 8 mm, the variation brought on the coupling strength
|S21| is very small, which changes from 28.93 to 29.27 dB.
On the other hand, to evaluate the far field communica-
tion capability with external monitoring station, the radiation
pattern of the proposed antenna at 5.8 GHz is measured in
anechoic chamber, and the comparison of the simulated and
measured results is shown in Figure 9. From the figure, we
can see the measured result matches well with the simulated
one, despite some slight discrepancy at the direction of u
equaling to 1208, which is probably contributed by the rigid
cable neglected in the simulation model.
5 | CONCLUSION
In this letter, a wristband repeater antenna utilizing metal frame
to enlarge the radiation aperture is proposed. It makes use of
circular notched ground and umbrella-shaped radiating strip to
enhance the operating bandwidth. In addition, two protruding
stubs coupled to the external metal frame are connected to the
ground, properly positioned to reduce the lower resonant fre-
quency to be around 2.45 GHz. By adopting the two
SREELAKSHMY ET AL.
| 2159

approaches mentioned above, the desired dual-band operation

at two ISM bands is achieved with wide bandwidth obtained. How to cite this article: Duan Z, Xu L-J. Dual band
Bidirectional telemetry of the antenna with both internal wristband antenna with metal frame loaded for bio-
device and external monitoring station is ensured by the medical applications. Microw Opt Technol Lett.
excellent coupling capability with internal implanted antenna 2017;59:21552159. https://doi.org/10.1002/mop.30690
at 2.4 GHz in the near field and the normal radiation to the
surface of human tissue in the far-field at 5.8 GHz. There-
Received: 23 February 2017
fore, the designed antenna can serve as a good candidate for
DOI: 10.1002/mop.30697
future healthcare monitoring applications in Wireless Body
Area Network (WBAN).
A wearable type embroidered
R EF ERE NC ES
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