Smart suit: Wearable sheet-like waveguide for body-centric wireless communications

This paper presents a new concept waveguide, smart suit, which improves wireless on-body transmissions. The smart suit consists of textile-based free access mat, which is a sheet-shaped waveguide. The free access mat is easily excited by typical antennas at an arbitrary position on the free access mat without electric contact point. The electromagnetic waves are concentrated into it so that small transmission loss and small accessible range of external antenna is enabled. Textile-based free access mat, its transmission characteristics, and the tolerance to the bending in the free access mat are experimentally studied. The smart suit using flexible free access mat greatly ameliorates the transmission loss and reduces the distortions caused by the presence of the human body.