Abstract
A method for measuring deembedded antenna parameters of wearable and implanted antennas for on-body communications is presented. It consists of a tapered flat phantom in order to characterize an antenna’s general ability to excite surface waves traveling along the boundary between body tissue and free space, expressed by an angular on-body antenna gain. The design offers a test zone large enough for most typical wireless body area network devices up to smartphone size while minimizing the required amount of tissue-simulating material. The designed antenna test range is validated in the 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band. To showcase the applicability to a realistic application, different designs of antennas integrated into an implanted pacemaker are characterized by their on-body gain patterns. A comparison of their performance in <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in situ</i> path-loss measurements reveals a clear relation to the on-body gain patterns and indicates that this parameter is a suitable measure for enabling educated antenna design for on-body applications.
Highlights
W IRELESS body area networks (WBAN) enable communication among electronic devices in the vicinity of the body and are established in many areas
The systematic characterization of antennas for on-body communications is difficult because of the coupling between the antenna and the human body as part of the propagation channel. It has been shown in the literature that a de-embedding is possible in the defined on-body far field and that an angular on-body gain can be defined
An antenna test range was designed based on analytical considerations, which should enable adapting the approach for other applications and frequency ranges
Summary
W IRELESS body area networks (WBAN) enable communication among electronic devices in the vicinity of the body and are established in many areas. While mathematically precise, the parameters that can be characterized this way (coefficients of the SWF expansion) cannot be used intuitively in the same way as the otherwise familiar radiation pattern Another more specific approach for de-embedding is based on the similarity of the on-body propagation to the so-called Sommerfeld problem of near-earth propagation, where we distinguish between surface waves and space waves. In [10], it has been successfully used within a numerical modeling framework for the educated design of antennas for hearing aids and pacemakers In this contribution, a test procedure and design of an antenna test range for measuring the on-body radiation pat-.
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