IET Microwaves, Antennas & Propagation

Research Article

Gain-enhancement technique for wearable ISSN 1751-8725

Received on 27th January 2020

patch antenna using grounded metamaterial

Revised 18th September 2020
Accepted on 25th September 2020
E-First on 14th October 2020
doi: 10.1049/iet-map.2020.0083
www.ietdl.org

Goutam Kumar Das1 , Subhadeep Basu1, Bappaditya Mandal2, Debasis Mitra1, Robin Augustine2,
Monojit Mitra1
1Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur, Howrah, West
Bengal, India
2Microwaves in Medical Engineering Group, Electrical Engineering, Division of Solid-State Electronics, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: In this study, a metamaterial (MTM)-based high-gain compact-wearable antenna for 2.45 GHz industrial, scientific and
medical radio band application has been proposed. To achieve the flexibility of the antenna, textile material felt fabric has been
chosen as the substrate of the antenna as well as MTM. An omega (Ω) like structure has been taken as MTM unit cell design.
High value of permeability is utilised for the gain enhancement of the antenna. In addition, very low specific absorption rate
(SAR) is obtained using the MTM which makes the proposed antenna suitable for the biomedical application. The proposed
antenna has achieved about 3 dB gain enhancement along with SAR value of 0.405 W/kg (1 g tissue). The design has been
optimised and the prototype with the optimised parameter has been fabricated and tested over the semi-solid phantom and
human body. Further, the proposed antenna over different type of textile material has also been validated.

1 Introduction resonator-based metasurfaces are required for generating the MVL.

In the case of the biomedical antenna, high gain generally increases
In recent years for the application of health monitoring wireless the specific absorption rate (SAR) value of the antenna. In [18, 19],
body area network\DIFdel{ (WBAN)} communication has been it's observed that a high value of ɛ drastically reduces the SAR of
attracting much attention [1]. In general, design of the antenna in the antenna. Hence, for simultaneous control of gain and SAR, the
the presence of the human body becomes more complicated than MTM can be used due to its unusual behaviour. In general, SRR-
for free-space environment. When an antenna placed close to like structure produce negative effective permeability and wire-like
human tissues, the antenna mainly suffers from low gain and structure provides negative effective permittivity [20, 21].
efficiency due to the lossy human tissue [2]. Therefore, the combination of these two structures has the
In case of free space, there are several methods to improve possibility to offer simultaneous control of permeability and
antenna gain. The earlier trend was to use a high dielectric permittivity, which can enhance the gain and reduce the SAR value
superstrate layer to enhance the antenna gain [3, 4]. Partially of the antenna. From the literature works [22, 23] it is known that
reflective surfaces [5], metamaterial (MTM) with low-refractive the omega structure is a combination of a C-shaped ring resonator
index [6], zero-refractive index [7] and high-refractive index [8] with two wires connected to both ends.
are generally used to enhance the gain of the antenna. Apart from Henceforth, in this paper, omega-shaped MTM has been used
MTM, gain or directivity of the antenna has also been increased over a planar antenna for controlling gain and SAR in the
using different superstrates like electromagnetic band gap (EBG), biomedical environment. A significant amount of gain
frequency selective surfaces (FSS) etc. [9, 10]. In [10] a detailed enhancement with a fully planar configuration has been
comparison among three different superstrates of FSS, dielectric investigated. Due to the MTM placement, a considerable amount of
slab and double negative MTM slab has been rigorously studied for SAR reduction has also been observed. Moreover, the proposed
the planar antenna. Despite the considerable amount of gain design exhibits better fractional bandwidth with respect to the
enhancement, the overall configurations of superstrate-based unloaded antenna. Flexibility of the proposed antenna
structures are bulky. Therefore, these types of configurations are configuration has been studied.
also not suitable for wearable antenna application.
In the case of wearable applications, various compact antenna
designs have been proposed using different periodic structures. In 2 Metasurface design
[11], a compact monopole antenna has been designed by For MTM design, felt fabric textile material with dielectric
integrating artificial magnetic conductor ground plane for constant 1.63, thickness 1 mm and loss tangent 0.044 has been
telemedicine applications. In the literature work [12], a more used as the substrate. Fig. 1 depicts the MTM unit cell with its
compact design has been demonstrated by employing a finite-sized transmission coefficient, whereas Fig. 2 presents the effective
metallic sheet backed metasurface. In [13], another compact- permeability and permittivity of the unit cell. The optimised
wearable antenna has been designed with an \DIFdel{electro- dimensions of the unit cell for acquiring high µ-value at industrial,
magnetic bandgap (}EBG\DIFdel{)} structure where the metallic scientific and medical (ISM) band are tabulated in Table 1.
layer is replaced by a conductive textile sheet to improve the According to our requirement, the high µ-value with high
comfort level. For enhancing the gain, FSS [14] and metasurface transmission coefficient has been obtained from the optimised unit
[15] has also been used as superstrate over the wearable antenna. cell in the operating frequency at 2.45 GHz.
Meanwhile, in case of free space, grounded MTM is another In this work, the grounded MTM concept given by Lovat et al.
way of gain enhancement for planar antenna configuration where [16, 17] has been used where they described that gain or directivity
the MTM is placed just above the antenna [16, 17]. In this concept, can be enhanced if an ɛ near-zero (ENZ) and/or MVL material
the gain of electric sources has been improved by using µ-very- excited through electric dipole source. For enhancement of
large (MVL) property of the MTM. Consequently, magnetic

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Fig. 1 Metamaterial unit cell
(a) Schematic topology of MTM unit cell, (b) Simulated reflection and transmission coefficient of the unit cell

Fig. 2 Unit cell characteristics

(a) Retrieved permeability of the unit cell, (b) Retrieved permittivity of the unit cell

Table 1 Optimised dimensions of the MTM unit cell

Parameters Value, mm Parameters Value, mm
r1 7 S 0.9
r2 8.5 Lm 8.35

broadside power density of the patch, the following equation has where P(0) is broadside power density, ηr is intrinsic impedance, ɛr
been used: is the permittivity and μr is the permeability of the MTM. From the
above equation, it is clear that the broadside power density will be
K02η0 2 increased to either higher value of μr or lower value of ɛr. So, the
P(0) = ηr (1)
8π 2 gain enhancement is achieved through the MVL or ENZ material.
In this work, we utilise the MVL property of the MTM to enhance
ηr = μr /εr (2)

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Fig. 3 Schematic representation of the MTM-loaded antenna on the body phantom

Table 2 Optimised dimensions of the rectangular patch

Parameters Value, mm Parameters Value, mm
Lp 47 Wfeed 3.7
Wp 47 Lslot 10
Lg 60 Wslot 0.5
Wg 60 — —

Table 3 Electrical properties and thickness of body phantom layers [24]

Body phantom Εr σ, S/m Thickness, mm
skin 38.1 1.43 2
fat 5.29 0.1 10
muscle 52.5 1.7 30

Table 4 Effect of MTM on resonance frequency and gain value of the antenna
Resonance Freq, GHz S11 at resonance, dB Gain, dB
without MTM 2.42 −28.983 4.77
with MTM 2.45 −25.633 7.79

the gain of a planar patch antenna particularly in case of skin, fat and muscle are represented by ‘t1’, ‘t2’ and ‘t3’,
biomedical environment. respectively.

3 Design and analysis of antenna over the human 3.1 Analysis of reflection coefficient
body The resonance frequency is shifted slightly and the gain of the
For on-body communication, the performance of the antenna is antenna has been improved due to the use of MTM over the
highly influenced when it comes to close contact with the human antenna. Overall effect of MTM has been tabulated in Table 4. The
body, like frequency shifting and deterioration of radiation pattern simulated reflection coefficient of the reference patch antenna in
and efficiency. Moreover, due to the movement of the body such free space, MTM-loaded antenna in free space as well as on the
influences are not steady. To overcome this problem our proposed body phantom model has been shown together in Fig. 4. The
antenna has been designed in such a way that it is directly attached reflection coefficient satisfy the lossy body phantom with respect
to the body. The antenna performance has been studied over a to free space. All simulations have been performed using finite
multilayer phantom model. element based high-frequency structure simulator (HFSS 19.0).
The MTM-loaded antenna has been placed over the multilayer The effect of placement of the MTM-loaded antenna over the
human body phantom as shown in Fig. 3. The proposed antenna is phantom model has been studied and the corresponding reflection
a conventional microstrip patch antenna with a length of Lp and a coefficient for different separation value of ‘d’ have been shown in
width of Wp at the top of the substrate with dimensions 60 mm × Fig. 5. A slight frequency shifting has been observed due to the
60 mm × 1 mm, while on the opposite side a ground plane with variation of ‘d’.
length Lg and width Wg are maintained. The feed line width Wfeed, According to the different size of the human arm, the antenna
has been investigated for different values of ‘R’. R is the radius of
slot length Lslot and slot width Wslot are estimated for attaining
curvature of our proposed antenna that has been deformed. Fig. 6
good impedance matching. A 3 × 3 MTM array has been placed depicts the reflection coefficient for the different R values. In the
just over the patch antenna. Felt fabric with dielectric constant inset, the simulated prototype of deformed proposed antenna has
1.63, thickness 1 mm and loss tangent of 0.044 had been used as also been shown. The reflection coefficient justified that the
the substrate material for designing both the antenna and MTM proposed antenna is well accepted as a wearable condition.
slab. The optimised dimensions of the patch are shown in Table 2. In reality, a wearable antenna is a part of clothing as we worn
The electrical property and the thickness of the phantom have clothes of different textile material. Hence, we chose three different
been chosen according to Table 3. The inset in Fig. 3 depicts that textile materials like polyester, poly cot and wash cotton over
MTM-loaded antenna configuration where ‘d’ is the gap between human tissue model and the result has been investigated for
the antenna and the three-layer phantom model. The thickness of

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Fig. 4 Simulated reflection coefficient of loaded antenna in free space and on phantom w.r.t ref. antenna in free space

Fig. 5 Simulated reflection coefficient for different separation distance ‘d’ between proposed antenna and body phantom model

validation. The return loss characteristic has been shown in Fig. 7. for the preparation of semi-solid phantom. The compositions used
The dielectric characteristics of the different textile material have for the fabrication of semi-solid phantom are tabulated in Table 6.
been used is tabulated in Table 5 [25]. The prototype of the proposed structure has been fabricated and
further measured using a vector network analyser (Anritsu S820E).
3.2 SAR analysis The fabricated design with measured set up with prepared semi-
solid phantom and human arm has been shown in Fig. 9.
SAR is the standard measurement for evaluating the Fig. 10 presents the measured return loss characteristics of
electromagnetic power absorption by human tissues. According to antenna in free space, on semi-solid phantom and also over the
the standard specification, SAR value should not exceed the limit human body (arm). From the figure, though it has been observed
1.6 W/kg for 1 g tissue. The simulated SAR distribution over the that the slight frequency shifting has occurred the −10 dB
phantom model for both with and without MTM-loaded antenna is bandwidth is within the required ISM band. Hence, proposed
shown in Fig. 7. SAR value is well within the specified range for antenna is well accepted as wearable antenna.
the proposed antenna. The figure depicts that along with its high The gain performance over the operating frequency band has
gain, a loaded antenna is better than the unloaded antenna in been investigated. In Fig. 11, the gain has been plotted with respect
wearable condition (Fig. 8). to frequency. It has been identified from the figure that due to the
MTM loading, gain has been enhanced significantly throughout the
4 Measured result and discussion operating band.
The normalised measured radiation pattern at the respective
For the measurement purpose, a semi-solid phantom model has frequency of their peak gain of loaded antenna in free space with
been prepared based on [26]. Agar, polyethylene powder, sodium respect to loaded antenna on phantom model and on human body
azide, guar gum, deionised water are the main components required for both E-field and H-field has been shown in Fig. 12. The

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Fig. 6 Reflection coefficient of deformed proposed antenna for different R (inset: conformal prototype of the proposed antenna)

Fig. 7 Simulated reflection coefficient of the loaded antenna over human tissue model superimposed with different textile material

Table 5 Dielectric characteristic of textile material

Parameter Polyester Polycot Wash cotton
dielctric constant 1.44 1.48 1.51
thickness 2.85 3 3
loss tangent 0.01 0.02 0.02

Fig. 8 Simulated SAR distribution on body phantom model

(a) Unloaded antenna, (b) MTM-loaded antenna

degradation in radiation pattern due to loss of the peak gain value whereas it is 2.6 dB more if it is placed on human body with
is significantly higher than the peak gain of the reference antenna. respect to the unloaded antenna. (Table 7)
Due to the grounded MTM effect, the gain is 3.02 dB more if the A comparison of the performances with some recently
proposed antenna has been placed on semi-solid phantom model, presented wearable antenna using a superstrate structure has been
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Table 6 Composition for semi-solid phantom
Components Quantity, g
sodium azide 0.19
agar 3
polyethylene powder 22.13
guar gum 1.98
DI water 100

Fig. 9 Photograph of the fabricated proposed antenna with measured set up

(a) In free-space, (b) On the semi-solid phantom model, (c) On the human arm

Fig. 10 Measured reflection coefficient for MTM loaded antenna in free space, MTM-loaded antenna on semi-solid phantom model and on human arm w.r.t
unloaded antenna

investigated. Our proposed antenna has obtained the most gain antenna. Recently in [28] SAR reduction of wearable antenna has
improvement in comparison with other recent literature. The also been achieved. However, simultaneously gain improvement
proposed antenna yields the least SAR value than others. with SAR reduction as well as maintaining low-vertical height has
Moreover, with respect to vertical height, our proposed antenna is been achieved using our proposed design.
more compact than the ones in the literature works [14, 15, 28].
Earlier superstrates were used generally to enhance the gain of the

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Fig. 11 Measured gain versus frequency for the loaded antenna in free space, on semi-solid phantom model and on human body w.r.t reference antenna

Fig. 12 Normalised measured radiation pattern for the loaded antenna in free space w.r.t. loaded antenna on semi-solid phantom model and on human body
(a) E-field, (b) H-field

Table 7 Comparison of the wearable antenna using superstrate

Parameter Vertical Resonant Freq, Peak gain, Gain improvement, SAR, W/Kg Superstrate type Comments
height, mm GHz dB dB
[14] 8 5.25 5.1 3 1 FSS • size↓
• gain↑
[27] 1.92 0.915 — — 1.56 dielectric superstrate • size↓
[15] 4 5.5 6.7 1.5 1.06 metasurface • gain↑
[28] 5 2.45, 5.8 −5.1, 3.3 — 0.74, 1.06 dielectric superstrate • size↓
• SAR↓
our proposed design 2 2.45 7.79 >3 0.405 metamaterial (grounded • size↓
MTM) • gain↑
• SAR↓

5 Conclusion proposed design more compact and planar. The performance of the
antenna on the human body and semi-solid phantom model has
Significant amount of gain enhancement with low SAR-wearable been investigated. The gain enhancement of about 3 dB has been
antenna has been proposed here. Using Ω-shaped MTM both procured if the proposed design is placed on semi-solid phantom
magnetic and electric resonance phenomenon is utilised here for model and 2.58 dB gain improvement has been acquired if it is
enhancing gain as well as reducing the SAR, respectively. Recently placed on human body (arm). The effect of antenna deformation
published textile-wearable antenna using periodic structure has due to bending according to the different radius of human arm has
been compared and investigated with our proposed design. The also been studied. For the real health care application the proposed
same ground plane of the antenna and the MTM makes the design has also been studied over different textile material like
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polyester, polycot, wash cotton etc. Meanwhile, the proposed [13] Gao, G.P., Hu, B., Wang, S.F., et al.: ‘Wearable circular ring slot antenna with
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