Realization and Analysis of a Novel Low-Profile Embroidered Textile Antenna for Real-time Pulse Monitoring
Abirami Anbalagan, Esther Florence Sundarsingh, Vimal Samsingh Ramalingam, Aadesh Samdaria, David Ben Gurion, Karthik Balamurugan
Abstract
In this paper, a novel four-layered low-profile, textile antenna operating in the Industrial Scientific and Medical band (ISM) has been proposed for wearable applications. The proposed antenna was completely made from textile materials with the substrate being cotton and the conductive portions done by embroidering Zari threads to the substrate. The realized antenna has a compact profile of 51 mm x 45 mm x 0.785 mm. To improve the return loss and gain, a rectangular slot of dimension 10 mm x 10 mm was introduced. On-body analysis also shows that the antenna has powerful performance with specific absorption rates well below the threshold specified by International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) for 1g and 10g tissue. In addition to validate the design, real-time deployment with a Particle Photon was done to continuously monitor the heart rate and upload it to the Particle app via cloud. The fabricated antenna was also evaluated under bent, crumpled, moisture absorbed and on-body conditions where the antenna performance was measured by Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) of the network connected to and the round-trip time taken by the device to successfully respond to the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) message sent by the Particle Cloud. On analysis, it was seen that the performance of the antenna was unaffected by the deformations induced making it best suited for on-body applications.