Abstract:

Wearable electronics have gained opportunities in recent years, and the last decade has been evidence of this growth in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). They meet the criteria for personalizing healthcare, communication, patient monitoring, tracking, and rescue operations. The main challenge for the WBAN is to handle the radiator's coupling with the human body. An artificially generated Electromagnetic Band Gap (EBG) structure was designed and used in this work to improve the performance of a microstrip patch antenna. A jeans-based microstrip patch antenna with an EBG surface demonstrated to enhance the performance for 5.5 GHz WiMAX application. The use of an EBG surface increases return loss by 20%, with a reasonable bandwidth of 0.528 GHz (5.271 GHz to 5.749 GHz) at the resonance frequency of 5.5 GHz. The EBG surface improved the Voltage Standing Wave Ratio (VSWR) by 60%. A three-layered human body tissue model is also used for on-body measurements to determine the performance of an EBG-based antenna. The presence of human tissues generally reduces performance and shifts the resonance, but the shifting in this work with the simplified EBG structure and adequate gain and VSWR is only 2.6 percent.

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