Abstract
Remote monitoring of the elderly in telehealth applications requires that the monitoring must not affect the elderly’s regular habits. To ensure this requirement, the components (i.e., sensor and antenna) necessary to carry out such monitoring should blend in with the elderly’s daily routine. To this end, an effective strategy relies on employing wearable antennas that can be fully integrated with clothes and that can be used for remotely transmitting/receiving the sensor data. Starting from these considerations, in this work, two different methods for wearable antenna fabrication are described in detail: the first resorts to the combined use of nonwoven conductive fabrics and of a cutting plotter for shaping the fabric, whereas the second considered fabrication method resorts to the embroidery of conductive threads. To demonstrate the suitability of the considered fabrication techniques and to highlight their pros and cons, numerical and experimental results related to different wearable antennas are also reported and commented on. Results demonstrate that the presented fabrication techniques and strategies are very flexible and can be used to obtain low-cost wearable antennas with performance tailored for the specific application at hand.
Highlights
Health care is an inalienable human right and, as such, it should not be considered a privilege for the few
The flexibility of the fabrication technique based on the combined use of self-adhesive nonwoven conductive fabrics (NWCFs) and a cutting plotter is confirmed by the results reported in Section 4.1 which refer to small and more complex antenna layouts
The fabrication of wearable antennas that could be integrated with sensors for remote monitoring of elderly people was addressed
Summary
Health care is an inalienable human right and, as such, it should not be considered a privilege for the few. The use of nonconventional fabrication techniques and materials combined with customized design strategies is required In this regard, the present paper focuses on fabrication techniques and materials which make the integration of the wireless monitoring platforms into garments easier. Through an overview of different wearable antenna prototypes, it is shown that by selecting an appropriate fabrication technique, the antenna and the other blocks of a wireless health care monitoring system (see Figure 1) can be successfully integrated with clothes.
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