Design of a printed symmetrical CPW-fed monopole antenna for on-body medical diagnosis applications

A printed symmetric co-planar waveguide (CPW)-fed on-body monopole antenna is proposed for use on human arm body phantoms in medical diagnosis applications. The advantages of the presented antenna over other on-body antennas include low profile, miniaturization, wide bandwidth, and lower reflection coefficient, with good peak gain and better impedance matching with the human phantom. The optimized antenna had dimensions of \(0.020\lambda _{0}\,\times \,0.015\lambda _{0}\,\times \,0.0013\lambda _{0}\) (where \(\lambda _{0}\) is the wavelength in air of the lowest operating frequency). It covers almost all bands used in wireless body area network (WBAN) applications, including Medical Implant Communication Service (MICS, 402–405 MHz), Wireless Medical Telemetry Service (WMTS, 420–1430 MHz), Medical-BAN (2.36–2.4 GHz) as well as industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM, 2.4–2.485 GHz). The fractional impedance bandwidth was simulated to be 170 % (0.25–3.05 GHz) in free space and 168 % (0.32–3.67 GHz) in the presence of a multilayer tissue model. The fractional impedance bandwidth was measured to be 162 % in free space and 161 % in the presence of a human arm body phantom.