Antenna Design for Tongue electrotactile assistive device for the blind and visually-impaired

Various types of medical and biomedical applications have been widely used antenna as a vital supporting part for their wireless communication. Since these antennas are used in and around a human body, their size must be small and their shape must be conformed to the human organism where they are placed. This paper describes a miniature dipole antenna for a tongue-placed electro-tactile device which is designed to support the blind and visually-impaired people in information transmission and mobility assistance. In order to check the performance of our antenna, the design parameters such as shape, length, and size and substrate material are evaluated by doing simulation. Due to the cable effect to small antenna in measurement, a Bazooka balun will be used for measurement. The measurement results suggest that the dipole antenna could provide a good reference for designed an antenna in tactile display applications.