Miniaturized Planar Inverted-F Antenna for Off-Body Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) Application

This paper proposes the design and simulation of a novel miniaturized Planar Inverted-F Antenna (PIFA) with a slotted radiating patch, having a low specific absorption rate (SAR). The operating frequency spectrum of the antenna is 2.34-2.58 GHz, which makes it perfectly suitable for applications in the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band (2.4-2.4835 GHz). The designed antenna has a very tiny structure with dimensions of 8 mm X 9 mm X 1.5 mm. While comparing with a few other antennas, the size was found to be considerably reduced by 56.80%. SAR measurement of this antenna has been done by designing six layer human head & human arm models, using Electromagnetic (EM) software HFSS, to study the interaction between the proposed antenna and human body tissues. The electric field distribution in the designed human head and human arm models are also shown to estimate the penetration of the field at 2.45 GHz, when the antenna is placed at a distance of 5mm from the designed models. The SAR analysis shows that though the Local SAR values in some of the layers of the designed human head and arm models are higher, the average SAR values in all the six layers of both the designed models are acceptable under the standard limits.