Slot-Based Miniaturized Textile Antenna for Wearable Application

The basic need of wearable devices is for hands-free movements or in some special cases where handheld electronic gazettes are not possible to carry. Due to the pandemic, in a body area network, the necessity for hands-free wearable gadgets is increasing worldwide. Along with hands-free, it should be compact enough to fit in a trivial place of transmitter. Therefore, advances in compact wearable antenna technology are being driven by this motivation. The main significance of reducing the size of the antenna is that they become lightweight, emit broad radiation across the surface of the human skin to offer full coverage, and reduce sensitivity to variation in distance between the antenna and the skin. This work presents a miniaturized fabric antenna that can be worn like normal clothing operating at 2.5 GHz and demonstrates a less complex size reduction technique. It further illustrates that coarse and fine frequency variability could be achieved by varying the patch and feed length, respectively, in a similar structure for some special application. The proposed results are tested with various practical conditions such as on-body and bending effect. This design recommends a simple slot technique without the use of any complicated methods such as metamaterial, substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technique, and electromagnetic bandgap (EBG). These complicated methods are used for size reduction by researchers in this field. However, this simple design offers the best solution for on-body communications and wearable applications.