Wearable antenna for biomedical applications

Wearable antennas are one of the important components of Body Area Networks. As technology is evolving, wearable antennas have attracted the interests because of its wide variety of applications in different fields including medical care, health-monitoring, patient-tracking, and emergency rescue ope

Project Title

Wearable antenna for biomedical applications

Project Area of Specialization

Wearables and Implantable

Project Summary

Wearable antennas are one of the important components of Body Area Networks. As technology is evolving, wearable antennas have attracted the interests because of its wide variety of applications in different fields including medical care, health-monitoring, patient-tracking, and emergency rescue operations. These antennas work in the vicinity of human body. For designing these antennas, textile materials are widely used because of its properties like flexibility, light weight, etc. For minimizing electromagnetic coupling to human body, different topologies like electromagnetic band gap and artificial magnetic conductor are used. These antennas require the use of a ground plane to isolate the antenna fields from mounting effects on materials such as lossy body tissues or metallic structures because of this, the fields are generally concentrated within the substrate, and the high loss tangent of the organic substrates used such as paper, causes significant degradation in antenna efficiency. Glucose monitoring, insulin pumps, deep brain simulations and endoscopy are a few examples of the medical applications that can take advantage of remote monitoring system and body implantable unit. Body implantable devices are widely researched for humans, in the applications such as monitoring blood pressure and temperature, tracking dependent people or lost pets, wirelessly transferring diagnostic information from an electronic device implanted in the human body for human care and safety, such as a pacemaker, to an external RF receiver. Antennas can be implanted into human bodies or can just be mounted over the torso to form a bio-communication system between medical devices and exterior instruments for short range biotelemetry applications.

Our project will b more focused on a reliable and sustainable antenna structure which is capable to perform effective close to human body. Improving isolation from human body proximity is the ultimate target. As it is targeting biomedical applications, a reliable communication link is required with no harm to the person wearing the device.

Project Objectives

The objective of project is that it must be useful, comfortable, noninvasive, and unobtrusive to the users. Objectives can be summarized as follows.

• A high-performance wearable antenna
• Antenna simulation results showing its appropriateness for wearable applications
• Antenna Fabrication
• Antenna Testing

Project Implementation Method

• Simulations using HFSS or CST tool
• Antenna Fabrication using inkjet printing or milling

The method used for project implementation is inkjet printing of silver nanoparticle inks on organic paper substrates. As ink is the highest cost of the entire fabrication process consuming about 90% of the total cost. So, Ink consumption is an important parameter when producing low-cost antennas

• Antenna Testing via NIE , NUST or foreign collaboration

Benefits of the Project

1. Wearable computing is a new, fast growing field in application-oriented research. Steadily progressing miniaturization in microelectronics along with other new technologies enables wearable computing to integrate functionality in clothing allowing entirely new applications. Medical prevention with continuously monitoring patient's health condition is such an application necessitating sensing devices close to the body. Wearable computing ideally combines these requirements since clothing offers unobtrusiveness and body proximity.
2. Further, patients would benefit most when health condition can be communicated to a medical center.
3. No setup requirements, project will focus on making use of the existing infrastructure 
4. It has ability to withstand damage obstacles (robustness).
5. Wearable antenna can be integrated with any biomedical device to communicate the data remotely and wirelessly

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

1. Patch of Antenna:

For comparison purposes, a conventional microstrip patch was designed to be resonant at 2.45 GHz and was fabricated using the same fabric materials of the dual-mode antenna. The ground plane has the same dimensions of the dual-mode antenna (80 mm×80 mm) and a patch with 52.2 mm × 52.2 mm is printed on a single layer of felt (height of 2.15 mm). The coaxial feed inset is 16 mm.  Two patch antennas were also built. Good impedance matching and typical broadside radiation pattern are obtained. 

Above stated work has already been found in literature.

1. Metamaterials:

A metamaterial is a material engineered to have a property that is not found in naturally occurring materials. They are made from assemblies of multiple elements fashioned from composite materials such as metals or plastics. The materials are usually arranged in repeating patterns, at scales that are smaller than the wavelengths of the phenomena they influence.

For applications such as military communication systems, search and rescue services, and medical applications a reliable and compact device producing superior performance is critical. Artificially engineered materials, comprising of periodic metallic structures generally known as Metameterial are capable of providing specific permeability and permittivity at microwave frequencies, and exhibit High Impedance Surface (HIS) characteristics. HIS structures exhibits unique electromagnetic properties of inphase reflection for plane wave incidence known as Artificial Magnetic Conductor (AMC) behaviour and suppression of surface wave propagation known as Electromagnetic Bandgap (EBG) behaviour.

Using metamaterials alongwith patch antenna can significantly improve the antenna performance and guarantee a reliable communication link.

Final Deliverable of the Project

Hardware System

Type of Industry

Medical

Technologies

Wearables and Implantables

Sustainable Development Goals

Good Health and Well-Being for People

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com