Abstract
This paper presents a metamaterial-based flexible wearable ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna for breast imaging and wireless body area network (WBAN) applications. The wearable antenna is required to be a planar and low-profile structure using flexible materials. The proposed antenna comprises two layers of denim (10 × 10 mm2) and felt (10 × 15 mm2). The antenna was integrated with six metamaterial unit cells using a modified grain rice shape within a split ring resonator to enhance the bandwidth, gain, and directivity and reduce the specific absorption rate value to less than 2 W/kg. The proposed antenna operates within a broad bandwidth range (6.5 GHz–35 GHz) with the maximum gain and directivity of 8.85 dBi and 10 dBi, respectively, and a radiation efficiency of more than 70% over its operating frequency band. The results verified good agreement between the simulation and measurement of the proposed technique in detecting an existing tumor with a diameter of 4 mm from any location inside the breast. The results convincingly proved the capability of the proposed wearable UWB antenna system for both WBAN and breast imaging applications.
Highlights
Wearable and flexible antennas have been produced for various applications, such as communication and embedded smart systems and health monitoring purposes
A metamaterial-based wearable flexible UWB antenna is designed at 5G frequency bands for breast cancer imaging and wireless body area network (WBAN) applications
It is integrated with six MTM arrays, where the MTM unit cell consists of an split ring resonator (SRR) with a modified rice grain shape, and two capacitive-loaded strips (CLSs)
Summary
The antenna is the key component within a WBAN system and it is an important part of a wearable monitoring system. The integration of wearable antennas with various electronic systems requires attention to reduce the on-body detuning. Along with the rise of IoT and other massive-machine type communications (MTC), the 5G showed an increment in the capacity as compared to the 4G networks.24 The new applications such as multi-way virtual meeting, virtual and augmented reality (VAR) and their requirements, remote hospital operations, and smart building and surfaces depicted that low frequency 5G bands will not be able to satisfy the demands from the massive users from these applications and a solution as higher as 5G bands and 6G should be introduced to replace them.. Apart from that the metasurface, electronic bandgap (EBG) and integrating a layer of metamaterial (MTM) can keep the SAR value in the acceptable range Various techniques such as metasurface and large intelligent surfaces (LIS) were used to obtain high gain and directive antenna.. Wearable UWB antennas were designed to operate at 3.1 GHz–11.3 GHz,40 2.9 GHz–11 GHz, GHz–12 GHz, and 2.7 GHz–10.26 GHz. A textile substrate material with a fractal patch was designed to resonate in the band of 1.4 GHz–20 GHz to be applicable for WBAN application. A novel wearable textile antenna with dimensions of 51 × 45 mm was designed for ISM application. A flexible planar quasi-Yagi UWB antenna was designed for WBAN with the BW of 7.4 GHz and dimensions of 34 × 30 mm2.46 A more flexible UWB antenna designed for communication, WBAN, and breast cancer detection applications was presented in Refs. 47–49
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