Wearable Antennas: Nontextile Versus Fully Textile Solutions

This article provides a few practical guidelines for designing wearable antennas. A crucial requirement for this kind of antenna is to be noninvasive and “invisible” to the final user. To this end, an application-centered approach is required for both the design and the fabrication process, which leads to high cost, thereby limiting the large-scale production of wearable antennas. Accordingly, this article pays particular attention to low-cost and time-saving fabrication techniques that distinguish between nontextile and fully textile antennas. Recent works that propose new fabrication techniques for realizing wearable antennas are also included in this article. Additionally, for each of the analyzed fabrication and design techniques, the suitable operational frequencies are also discussed