A Unique, Compact, Lightweight, Flexible and Unobtrusive Antenna for the Applications in Wireless Body Area Networks

A novel design of a wearable antenna is proposed in this paper. The proposed antenna is optically transparent, flexible, compact and lightweight which are the desirable characteristics of the wearable antennas. Square ring type design is proposed for our antenna. Ring antenna is compact in size compared to patch antenna and it radiates at broadside direction like a patch antenna. Our proposed antenna operates at 5.8 GHz Wi-Fi band. Full ground plane is utilized in the design to minimize the back radiation of the antenna and thus minimizes the interaction of the antenna radiation with human-body. The proposed materials for the antenna realization are transparent conductive mesh, VeilShield for the antenna conductive parts and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) for the substrate and protective coatings of the antenna. Both VeilShield and PDMS are conformal and have very good light transmittance. So, our proposed antenna has flexibility and optical transparency and thus it will be a promising candidate for the applications in wireless body area networks that need unobtrusive appearance.