Enhanced Bandwidth of Hexagonal Slotted UWB Textile Antenna Sensor for Breast Cancer Detection System

Breast cancer is the most common disease among women and has become one of the leading causes of death in women worldwide. Early breast cancer detection is very crucial to attain an optimum medical treatment. This paper presents a hexagonal slotted Ultra-Wideband (UWB) textile antenna for breast cancer detection systems. The proposed antenna has a dimension of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$44\times 38\text{mm}_{2}^{2}$</tex>, with a substrate made of felt material characterized by a relative permittivity, <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\varepsilon_{r}$</tex> of 1.44, a loss tangent, <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$tan\delta$</tex> of 0.044, and a thickness, <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$h$</tex> of 1.5 mm. The radiating element and ground plane of the antenna are using ShieldIt Super and the thickness is set to be 0.17 mm. The proposed antenna sensor consists of a hexagonal slotted monopole antenna and a partial ground plane. The partial ground plane technique is used to enhance the performance as well as to tune in the desired frequency range. The antenna operates from 2 to 10 GHz with a maximum gain of 3.62 dBi. In addition, the proposed textile antenna has a compact structure, wide bandwidth, lightweight, and flexible, thus meeting the requirements of breast cancer detection systems.