Recent Advancement of Wearable Reconfigurable Antenna Technologies: A Review

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) technology is gaining popularity in personal communication due to the expanding improvement in wireless technology. Wearable antennas are utilized in various WBAN applications including personal healthcare, entertainment, military, and many more due to their attractive characteristics and the potential for integrating lightweight, compact, low-cost, and adaptable wireless communications. A wearable reconfigurable antenna will allow a single antenna to operate at multiple resonant frequencies, radiation, polarization or hybrid between them, by using single or multiple active switching devices for signal transmission and reception in different parts of human body, rather than using multiple antennas. Over the years, several review papers were reported on wearable antennas which discussed the requirements and issues of wearable antennas in terms of their design, fabrication, and measurement. Nowadays, WBAN technology employs a single wearable reconfigurable antenna to perform multiple functions in different parts of human body. Recently, a significant amount of work has been carried out in the area of wearable reconfigurable antennas for WBAN applications. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the requirements and analysis needed for wearable reconfigurable antennas such as Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) for on-body analysis, investigation of the antennas in bending conditions, reconfigurable techniques and reconfigurable performance metrics.