A wideband ZOR on-body antenna for WBAN applications

Abstract

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in WBAN systems for various applications such as biomedical, military and commercial services [1, 2, 3]. The WBAN systems should satisfy rigorous requirements for antennas such as small size, large bandwidth, low specific absorption rate (SAR), and stable performance when the antenna is applied to the various parts of human body [1]. To monitor a patient's health status, the communication between biomedical device and human body needs to be done in real time. However, antenna performance is greatly affected by body tissues due to the electrical properties of human body. In order to overcome body effects and achieve small antenna size, the zeroth-order resonance (ZOR) antennas was proposed in [3]. In this paper, a wideband ZOR on-body antenna for Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band (2.4 GHz~2.4835GHz) is proposed. The wideband performance is achieved by utilizing the two slightly different ZOR frequencies. Moreover, the antenna performance is insensitivity to human body effect and the separation distance between the phantom and antenna.