Investigations on the Design of Compact Flexible Wearable Fractal Patch Antenna for Body Area Networks Applications

In this research work, the authors have presented the design of a compact flexible wearable fractal patch antenna used for body area networks (BAN) applications in the 2.45 GHz ISM band. For the size miniaturization of the antenna the crown fractal patch antenna geometry has been used. Five flexible substrate materials namely denim, polythene foam, cotton cloth, felt and fleece have been analysed as the substrates of the antenna and the antenna size miniaturization ranging from 24.1 to 29.7% has been achieved. The denim substrate based antenna occupies the minimum area as compared to that of all the other four designed antennas; hence, the denim substrate based antenna has been fabricated and experimentally tested. The measured parameters of the antenna show good agreement with the simulated values. The proposed fabricated denim substrate based antenna has also been analyzed for bending effect evaluation and it has been found that the horizontal and vertical bending up to the bending radius of 45 mm of the antenna does not significantly affect the performance of the antenna. The equivalent circuit analysis of the proposed antenna has been presented and the theoretical, simulated, and experimental results have been found in good agreement.