Coating Based Wearable Disc-Shaped Textile Array Antenna for Wireless Body Area Network

This paper focuses with the design of a wearable textile disc-shaped array antenna for use in wireless body area network (WBAN) communications developed based on a coating technique. Textile materials provide the necessary wearability and flexibility, allowing the antenna to be worn on the body. The proposed array antenna consists of three layers of cotton textile as the substrate material, with the conductive coating paint used on the radiating element and the groundplane. The radiating element is formed into a disc shape comprises four patches and fed by an open ring feeding network with a circumference of around <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\lambda$</tex>. Each patch segment is <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$90^{\circ}$</tex> phase-shifted to achieve different phase of wave radiation utilizable to gain circular polarization. The characterization results show that the array antenna resonates at the frequency of 5.8 GHz with the bandwidth response of 270 MHz, making it suitable for WBAN communications.