A wide-band flexible body-worn antenna for bio-medical and 5G applications to serve communities of smart cities

A broad-band, conformal, highly efficient antenna for bio-medical and 5G applications is presented in this paper to serve the communities of smart cities. Flexibility of an antenna is achieved by printing radiating elements (both antenna and ground plane) on 0.6-mm-thick jeans fabric whose dielectric constant (ξ r ) and tangential loss (δ) are 1.78 and 0.035, respectively. The designed antenna spans the spectrum from 2 to 4 GHz over a 10 dB scale for reflection coefficient (66.67% impedance bandwidth). Wide-band operation of the proposed antenna is obtained by making a square slot in the ground plane along with a circular radiator that is printed above the substrate. The proposed body-worn antenna is manufactured, and typical parameters are measured. To validate the real-time performance of the antenna, conformability analysis has been made, thereby assessing the robustness of the proposed system. The antenna achieves overall efficiency up to 90% over the operating spectrum with a substantial gain of around 3.35 dBi. The antenna exhibits a minimum Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) lower than 0.7 W/Kg for both 1 g and 10 g human tissues. A detailed state-of-the-art comparison has been provided to demonstrate how it differs from other antennas in the literature.