On the use of soft surfaces to reduce back radiation in textile microstrip patch antennas

Nowadays there is a huge number of innovative wireless services demanded by the users and all of them require antennas with new features. One of these new characteristics which is very convenient for the comfortability of the users is the integration of some of these services in the garments in other words to design wearable terminals. On the other hand, for monitoring or detection applications, such as firefighters, the integration of the antennas in these garments is not only a question of convenience, it is a security necessity. However, most of the actual devices loose part of the radiated energy in radiation to the body of the wearers. In this communication, we propose the combination of soft surfaces with traditional microstrip patch antennas for reducing the level of back radiation in wearable applications. The studied has been extended to the case of cylindrical modification of the antenna´s shape to take into account the conform-ability that will be required to the textile antenna.