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Editorial: Wearable Antennas and Systems
Editorial: Wearable Antennas and Systems
Editorial
Wearable Antennas and Systems
Copyright 2012 Paul R. Young et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The topic of wearable antennas and body-centric commu- A large number of submissions were received for this
nication systems has received a great deal of interest over special issue and the papers with relevant technical content
the past few years with many applications in health care were selected after review by experts. Brief synopses of some
and sports science being proposed. These applications have of the selected papers are given below.
included body area networks (BAN), where an array of Eect of earth ground and environment on body-centric
devices or sensors, distributed across the body, communicate communications in the MHz band, by K. Fujii and Y. Oku-
wirelessly to a body-mounted central hub, to be routed to mura, studies the eect the physical ground has on a body
an o body receiver for medical or sports monitoring. Other centric system. The authors model the human body shunted
applications include RFID tags mounted on body that can to earth ground in a radio anechoic chamber to analyze the
be detected, wirelessly, for health care or security monitoring electric field strength around it and clarify the eect of earth
systems. ground during BAN run time. The results suggest that earth
Naively, one may imagine that these systems are merely ground has little influence on the human body and wearable
developmental with no need for further research; however, devices. Only when the human body is directly grounded,
there are a number of challenges that engineers face in the electric field near the feet area will decrease. The input
designing antennas and communication systems on body impedance of the transmitter is approximately the same, and
that are not present in a conventional system. Firstly, in body- the received open-circuit voltage and current of the receiver
centric systems, the antenna is necessarily mounted in close are also the same. In addition, the authors also suggest that
proximity to human tissue. Human tissue has a large dielec- stable communications can be established by developing a
tric constant compared to conventional RF substrate materi- closed circuit using earth ground as return path.
als and a significant conductivity; as such, the body can have The problems of antennas on textile substrates are
a great eect on an antennas characteristics. This problem is addressed in Metamaterial embedded wearable rectangular
compounded by the need to mount the antenna on a textile microstrip patch antenna, by J. G. Joshi, S. S. Pattnaik, and S.
substrate, as part of an everyday garment, with the associated Devi. Here, the authors propose a modified patch antenna
problems in maintaining the antennas performance when embedded with a metamaterial square SRR, on a fabric
the fabric is flexed or bent. For on-body networks, where substrate, that maintains its characteristics even when flexed.
communication between devices is necessary, the eect the The bending eect on the performance of wearable antenna
body has on the channel must be characterised. This is is shown to be reduced by making slots in the radiating
particularly challenging due to the variability in human body patch but it leads to mismatching at the desired lower
shape and the dynamic nature of the channelwith move- resonance frequency. The authors report that embedding a
ment of the body greatly aecting the channel characteristics, metamaterial SRR is an advantageous approach to obtain
blocking, and scattering the signal in a complicated manner. better impedance matching at the desired resonant frequency
2 International Journal of Antennas and Propagation
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