Textile UWB Antennas for Wireless Body Area Networks

A new ultrawideband (UWB) textile antenna designed for UWB wireless body area network (WBAN) applications is presented. Unlike previous textile antennas, these antennas offer a direct integration into clothing due to a very small thickness (0.5 mm) and flexibility. We have realized two different designs of textile antennas: coplanar waveguide fed printed UWB disc monopole and UWB annular slot antenna. To our knowledge, these are the first textile UWB antennas reported in the open literature. Measured return loss and radiation pattern characteristics of textile UWB antennas agree well with simulations. Moreover, measured transfer functions show that these textile antennas possess excellent transient characteristics, when operating in free space as well as on the human body. They can operate in the entire UWB band approved by the Federal Communications Commission (3.1-10.6 GHz)