DEVELOPMENT OF WEARABLE ANTENNA FOR HEALTH MONITORING SYSTEM (A STUDY ON DIFFERENT SUBSTRATE PROPERTIES)

• Main Author: SYAMIMI AMANI, HANUAR
• Format: Final Year Project Report
• Language: English; English
• Published: Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, (UNIMAS) 2019
• Subjects: TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering
• Online Access: http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/34427/1/DEVELOPMENT%20OF%20WEARABLE%20ANTENNA%20FOR%20HEALTH24pgs.pdf; http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/34427/4/Syamimi%20Amani%20ft.pdf; http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/34427/

Wearable antenna is a flexible antenna that is made up with fabrics as their substrate, whether fully or partially and it is functioning while being worn and it is required to be small in size, comfortable, conformal to the body shape, lightweight, easy to fabricate and most importantly is flexible. Accordingly, the function of detecting, simulating and communicating of wearable antenna that is integrated with sensors can be implemented with health monitoring system. With the involvement of this technology, health monitoring process is much easier in the future since all of the processes can be done wirelessly and remotely. Healthcare is very important to the mankind. It is motivates the researchers about the need of invention of an innovative yet cost-effective solutions for a efficient health monitoring.The old method of monitoring the patients in the hospitals which using many appliances connected with cables need to be replaced into wireless and wearable technologies and devices. Hence, wearable antenna technology is introduced. As for the wearable antenna, substrate selection of the antenna is one of the fundamental proportions that affect the effectiveness and efficiency of the device. Hence, a study on different substrates or fabric properties in a development of wearable antenna for health monitoring system has been the concern for this project. Types of substrates selected are cotton, jeans and fleece with dielectric permittivity of 1.60, 1.60 and 2.22 respectively. Patch antenna is the type of antenna that being chosen since it is the most suitable candidate for wearable antenna. Design of antennas that is utilized by different substrates is being created using electromagnetic tools which is Computer Simulation Technology (CST) and operating at frequency of 2.4 GHz. The result of this study has been recorded and compared. It is included the return loss, gain, radiation pattern, bandwidth, durability, water absorption and the weight of antenna after being fabricated. After the comparison, the suitable antenna for different occasions such as sports, office and daily wear has been identified. For cotton fabric, it is suitable for every occasion since it is lightweight, good absorption of water and having a good durability. Meanwhile for jeans fabric as the antenna’s substrate, it is only suitable for daily used due to the heavy weight, it cannot be used for sportswear. Fleece is better than jeans, but less than cotton when compared to the performances of the antenna properties.