wearable flexible substrate antenna

This project is designed and implementation of  wearable antennas for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). WBAN is one of the systems that was developed in order to serve human health care situation, via providing a real-time patient health status, monitoring, receiving and sending health da

Project Title

wearable flexible substrate antenna

Project Area of Specialization

Wearables and Implantable

Project Summary

This project is designed and implementation of  wearable antennas for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). WBAN is one of the systems that was developed in order to serve human health care situation, via providing a real-time patient health status, monitoring, receiving and sending health data with a medical server, while keeping the patient at his natural environment like staying at home or anywhere else in his everyday life. WBAN find Its application mostly in the medical and healthcare systems. Antennas are designed to be worn by a person. The major characteristic of an antenna’s substrate i.e. the dielectric constant is the primary target here through which desired communication can be achieved with any substrate once the epsilon is found. We are working in accordance with this aim- to find the dielectric constant of desired material and then use the said material for on body communication. The applications do not limit themselves to just that though, these wearable antennas can be integrated in latest gadgets such as smart watches, fitness bands and can also be expanded in the field of bio medicine where monitoring of a person plays a huge role leading to the more complex domain of in body communication where nano sized antennas can be implanted in patients for tumor detection and other abnormalities. Other areas of applications include military communication, the need presented by paramedics and even firefighters where the convenience of an on body communication device can do wonders.

Project Objectives

Objectives of this project are:

• Determining the dielectric constant of various substrates
• Using inkjet printer with conductive ink to print antenna structures on substrates
• Induction of EBG technology in the designed antennas

Explanation of the above mentioned tasks is given below in the respective order

The aim of this project is simple however the manufacturing of the product is not. To explain the former, the main objective is to determine the dielectric constant of materials (currently fabrics) and producing an entire antenna on that material which is to be used as the substrate.  Once this procedure is perfected we can fabricate antennas on any wearable entity. To be precise, the dielectric constant holds the utmost significance and is the key to wearable communication technology; hence the first and utmost important goal is to design a generic recipe to determine this precious quantity for any material presented.

To achieve the aforementioned goal there are certain techniques which need to be acquired first. These antennas would work most accurately if they were to be printed on the substrates i.e. printing the geometry of the antenna by an inkjet printer with conductive ink. Since such types of printers are not available in the market, we are going to make one through ways of our own.

One of the main objectives is to recognize the EBG (electrical band gap) technology in our work. Since these antennas are meant to be worn by human beings it is imperative that we put the health and lives of people first. This is where the EBG structures (meta-materials) come in. The purpose of these structures is to direct the radiations away from the body of the person wearing it and avoid close contact radiation to the body. These structures give the radiation a purposeful and intended direction, and in turn our product a safe usage and practice.

Project Implementation Method

As described earlier, the implementation is via the inkjet printer with conductive ink patterns printed on the substrates. This procedure is a prerequisite of determining the dielectric constant since practical implementation of antennas has to be done in order to get a practical dielectric constant since we obviously cannot just rely on theoretical concepts. Up till now we have determined dielectric constants of various materials through metallic copper sheets, and adhesive copper tapes/sheets on mainly denim fabric. Different geometries have been adopted that yielded expected results. These results have been outstanding but have to be improved via the printing procedure. The fabrication of the test antenna for the determination paves the way for our formulations to come in to play and from there we derive the characteristics of the final antenna to be produced.  The discussion of formulations and the theory is considered to be redundant here but can be thoroughly explained if asked for.

• Measure the resonant frequency of the patch.
• Compute ?reff based on formula.
• Extract the value of ?r from ?reff.

To summarize the implementation cycle, the process has the following steps:

• Design theory of the antenna- determining the desired characteristics in theory
• Rigorous simulations on CST Studio- Each antenna is perfected on software before moving on to the next stage. Gaining a perfect simulation takes a lot of tweaks in the original design and this step can prove to be a time consuming process
• Fabrication- Once the simulations have achieved the desired results fabrication of the antenna is put into work using the procedure described in the starting of this section
• Testing- The fabricated antenna is tested through vector network analyzers and matched with the simulations. If the results vary from each other the entire process is restarted and simulations are drafted once again from scratch
• Practical application-The final product achieved after the testing phase is finally put to use. These applications are described in detail in the following section.

Benefits of the Project

Applications of this project are countless. Our aim is split into three categories.

The first one is:

• The usage of wearable technology in the field of luxury electronics and smart appliances.
• These include smart phones, smart watches, fitness bands, shoes and accessories such as gloves and glasses/spectacles.
• All of these gadgets used or worn by people present a great opportunity for our low cost and highly efficient antenna in today’s age of technology conscious society and hyper advances in the field of smart gadgets.

The second area of relevance for this technology is bio medicine:

• Sensitive patient monitoring machines can be designed using these flexible transmitters
• This technology can be extended to full body suits for medical purposes which may include abnormality detection on and inside the human body.
•  Furthermore this technology is the cornerstone of in body nano sized antenna implantation. 

The third field of application, which is just as significant as the two mentioned above is the military and police service along with paramedics and firefighters. The job description of these brave professions does not allow casualness and comes with a heavy reliance on accuracy and efficiency. Wearable communication, however can allow these professionals to not worry about heavy communication devices when they are on field. Convenience can be provided to these people and can be coupled with the latest technology to come up with required devices and improvement in the older ones.  

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

• A wearable antenna is an essential part of any wireless body-centric network.We used flexible substrate for antenna design.Our primary objective is to propose an implementable technique to measure the dielectric constant ( epsilon ) of any flexible substrate (jeans).

1. Method to find the dielectric constant for any substrate.
2. We will use this technique to implement flexible substrate antenna design for successful WBAN networking (body-centric communication)
3. implementation of antenna for ISM band.

Final Deliverable of the Project

Hardware System

Type of Industry

Health , Telecommunication

Technologies

Wearables and Implantables

Sustainable Development Goals

Good Health and Well-Being for People, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Required Resources

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