Design and characterization of an UWB wearable antenna

A new compact planar ultra-wideband antenna designed for on-body communications is presented. The antenna is characterized in free space, on a homogeneous phantom modeling a human arm, and on a realistic high-resolution whole-body voxel model. In all configurations, it demonstrates very satisfactory capabilities for on-body propagation. The results are presented for the return loss, radiation pattern, efficiency, E-field distribution, and specific absorption rate (SAR). The antenna shows very good performance within 3-11.2 GHz range, and therefore it might be used successfully for 3.1-10.6 GHz UWB wireless communications. A prototype has been fabricated and measured on a homogeneous phantom. Good agreement between numerical and experimental results was demonstrated.