Design Implantable Antennas with Human Body Effect

Abstract

Implantable antenna devices have made great progress for healthcare services. Amongst the overall components of the implantable device, the antenna is the most important component that exists; it used to transmit the biological data wirelessly from inside the human body tissues to an external receiver. However, the human body tissues’ surrounding the antenna decrease the performance of the radiation antenna device, change its characteristics and absorbs most of its radiation. It also limits the size of the implantable device and its battery. Therefore, the design of the implanted antenna inside the human body requires many challenges while meeting many contradictory design parameters at the same time. Therefore, in this research, we mainly focused our spotlight on investigating and designing new antenna structures with robust performance against the human body tissue effect. In this research work, we presented two designs of a dual-band microstrip patch implantable antenna to operate ((401-406 MHz) Medical Device Radio-Communications (MedRadio), 433MHZ 2.45 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) bands, respectively. This is to satisfy the requirements of data transfer, power saving and wireless power transfer. The first design in this paper is a new shape of microstrip patch implantable antennas with meandered serpentine slot, with a single feed point. This shape of design allows us to increase the length of the current path in order to decrease the antenna size and covers MICS and ISM bands with new dimensions of (31 x 25 x 1.63) mm, the measured frequencies range we obtained it’s from 378MHz to 450 MHz (17.3%) at the lower band and from 2.46 to 2.68 GHz (8.56%) at the upper band for 11 less than -10 dB. The second simulated design is a compact dual-band Planar Inverted-F Antenna (PIFA) with Open-End Slots on ground with dimensions of (19.8x19.4x1.27) mm the measured frequencies from 325MHz to 407MHzrange at the lower band and from 2.412GHz to 2.482GHz for PIFA antenna, the designs of both antennae constructed and measured using CST and HFSS simulation and measurement setup. We also explained and demonstrated the performance of these antenna designs and the effect of human body tissue on antenna parameters, based on the reflection coefficient in normal and bent conditions.