© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
Sensors, 2020, 20(7), 1987
Epidermal antenna
Flexible wideband antenna
Microwave medical applications
Microwave thermometry is a noninvasive and passive technique for measuring internal
body temperature. Wearable compact antennas, matched to the specific body area, are required for this method. We present a new epidermal wideband antenna for medical radiometry. The double asymmetric H-shaped slot antenna was designed to be matched to different parts of the body without fat layers. The slots are fed by a short-circuited microstrip line in order to decrease size and back radiation, thus reducing potential interferences. In this way, contribution to radiometric temperature due to back radiation is lower than 4%, versus the 20% of the volume under investigation, over the whole operating frequency band. The designed prototype was manufactured on a flexible substrate.
The antenna is a very small size, to make it comfortable and suitable for being used by patients with different body mass indexes. The double H-shaped antenna shows good wideband matching results from around 1.5 GHz up to 5 GHz, in different body locations such as the neck, foot instep and foot sole.
; Ruiz Alzola, Juan
