Wearable embroidered antenna design for body worn application

Abstract

Wearable textile antenna is a technology for future body worn applications as a part of effort to enhance the quality of daily life. As a body worn antenna, the antenna should own a characteristics such as flexible, lightweight, small size and easily integrated onto body of human or animal. In this project, wearable textile dipole antenna with UTM logo shape was designed for body worn application. The antenna was operated under 3 GHz resonant frequency. Substrate used for this antenna is fleece fabric and the radiating element is covered by copper thread. This antenna is fabricated by using embroidery technique where the radiating element is integrated into substrate rather than attached to the substrate by glue or handsewn. The objectives of this project are to design and simulate wearable dipole antenna for body worn application, to fabricate wearable dipole antenna using embroidery technique and to compare the performance of embroidered dipole antenna with ShieldIT fabric dipole antenna, The design and simulation of the antenna is done by using Computer Simulation Technology (CST) Microwave Studio software. Fabrication of the antenna is done by embroidered UTM shape dipole antenna on fleece substrate by using computerized embroidery machine.The result showed that ShieldIT fabric dipole antenna had better performance than embroidered antenna in term of return loss and bandwidth.