A novel fabric WLAN antenna for wearable applications

Author

Salonen, P. ; Hurme, L.

Author_Institution

Inst. of Electron., Tampere Univ. of Technol., Finland

Volume

2

fYear

2003

fDate

22-27 June 2003

Firstpage

700

Abstract

The development of wearable computer systems and smart clothing has been rapid. They are coming more and more lightweight and quite soon we will see a wide range of unobtrusive wearable and ubiquitous computing equipment integrated to into our everyday wear. Rapid progress in wireless communication promises to replace wired-communication networks in the near future in which antennas have a more important role. This paper presents a novel fabric WLAN antenna for wearable applications such as sports wear and emergency worker outfits. The substrate of the patch antenna is made of a very low-cost fleece fabric. The radiating element and groundplane are made of knitted copper. To our best knowledge this is the first compact fabric antenna design for commercial smart clothing. Measured results are compared with simulations and good agreement was observed.

Keywords

UHF antennas; clothing; copper; fabrics; microstrip antennas; wireless LAN; Cu; emergency worker outfits; fabric WLAN antenna; ground plane; knitted copper; low-cost fleece fabric; patch antenna; radiating element; smart clothing; sports wear; wearable antennas; Antenna measurements; Application software; Clothing; Copper; Fabrics; Patch antennas; Ubiquitous computing; Wearable computers; Wireless LAN; Wireless communication;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Antennas and Propagation Society International Symposium, 2003. IEEE

Conference_Location

Columbus, OH, USA

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7846-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/APS.2003.1219332

Filename

1219332