Wearable Microstrip Patch Antenna to Develop Wireless Body Area Network for Electroencephalogram (EEG) Application

In this research, a wearable antenna was implemented using a microstrip patch form with 2.4 GHz, developed as a band application of industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency for wireless body area networks specifically for electroencephalogram (EEG) application. The wearable microstrip patch antenna was fabricated using copper with 0.06 mm thickness composed of pure copper and polyester materials and a felt fabric substrate with a dielectric constant 2.4. As a result, the prototype of the wearable antenna was designed with a patch antenna size of 39 mm. Following the measurements using a vector network analyzer (VNA), the wearable antenna has resonance in return loss -12.95 dB and VSWR of 1.79. The wearable antenna was directly measured on the human body towards the skin surface and head cap surface, and the calculated result showed that the wearable antenna meets the requirement of resonance in return loss < -10 dB.