Wearable Textile Antenna Using Thermal-Print of Clothes Iron for the Indoor Wireless Remote Monitoring

Wearable technology has grown tremendously throughout the time and is well known in transmitting or receiving the data for the remote monitoring in the telehealth applications. However, the existing wearable technology including the textile-antennas have limitation due to the high cost material, challenging fabrication, metal fatigue, porous and produce high loss. To address this issue, in this research, a low cost method using thermal-print of clothes iron is proposed. A low cost material of conductive carbon is used where no sintering or fabrication process is needed while provide the affordable fabrication cost. The textile antenna had return loss, S11 of −31.6 dB, the gain of 4.1 dB, the bandwidth of 6.9%, while the directivity was 3.812 dB at 5.8 GHz. The antenna prototype provides a convenient and unobtrusive communication subject to flexing and bending. In the prototype module testing, the transceiver antenna can transmit and receive the signal effectively up till 3 m’ coverage. Moreover, after repeated flexing, the surface and RF performance of the textile antenna did not degrade, so it can be a suitable device in the future generations, especially in indoor wireless remote monitoring