Planar Textile Antenna for Body Centric Wireless Communication System

Abstract—One of the most important aspects for body centric communication is the development of the textile antenna for on-body communication. Antennas for on-body environment usually suffer performance degradation caused by the human body. Apart from that, textile antenna gets easily bent, flexed, wrinkled or wet. This paper presents an investigation on three different designs and types of planar antennas, which are single band textile dipole antenna, fractal Koch multiband dipole antenna and monopole ultra wide band antennas. The performance of the antennas has been evaluated in terms of bending, wetness condition and on-body simulation. The results show that the bending effect is not critical in free space for the planar antennas, but the performance is notably degraded under wet condition while the antenna reflection coefficient is shifted when placed on the human body. 1