I'm not an expert, but I've seen a few conference papers on the subject in which ordinary microstrip antennas were used in this scope. If I'm not mistaken, the example addressed the case of a firefighter uniform, with some kind of pocket on the shoulder dedicated to have a microstrip antenna inserted in it. It's also worth remarking that there are many rogers' substrates flexible enough to be used in a conformal way, such as in the above example.
There are some papers that a wearable antenna is realized on Rogers substrate (Such as Lee, J., S. I. Kwak, and S. Lim. "Wrist-wearable zeroth-order resonant antenna for wireless body area network applications." Electronics Letters 47.7 (2011): 431-433.) But you should use the Rogers substrates that is very flexible in order to use for wearable applications.
Hi all,
It really depends on the application of the antenna. There are some wearable antennas which are inserted in wireless sensors for sport applications. The whole module is boxed in a container made of plastic and the antenna is not in direct contact with the body. In such applications, every sort of substrate is possible because antenna would be printed in the same substrate with sensor and transceiver.
You can design wearable microstrip antenna on any substrate whose thickness is between 0.1 mm to 0.2 mm.
[In my point of view]
Depends on what wearable application you want to design for. If it desirable for the antenna to be highly conformable to object surface or follow particular curvature, then you can consider highly flexible material other than roger. Flexible material might incurred less losses/shortcoming to the antenna performance.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Engineering
- Telecommunications Engineering
- Antennas and Propagation