Broadband Textile Hexagonal Metasurface Antenna for Wearable Applications

Wearable antennas work in close proximity to the human body and so suffer from frequency shift due to the dielectric and lossy effects of human body tissues as well as due to some bending. A wide operational bandwidth and stable performance under bending conditions are desired for wearable antenna designs. In this paper, a wearable antenna design based on a hexagonal unit cell structure is presented and the effect of bending on the antenna is analyzed. The conductive part of the antenna is embroidered with conductive threads onto a textile surface. Polymer composite is used as the substrate of the antenna. With the wideband hexagonal element design, the antenna can achieve an operation bandwidth from 4.63 GHz to 7.22 GHz and a stable realized gain of 10 dBi when attached to a voxel human body model