Antipodal UWB antenna with directivity for microwave tomography and reconfigurable design for biomedical applications

There is a significant requirement for advanced antenna designs, aiming at highly efficient and compact antennas, especially for medical applications, including microwave imaging, as well as wearable devices & deployments. Most of the previously constructed UWB antennas suffer from various drawbacks, such as size inaccessibility, sub optimally good gain, and lower flexibility, limiting their readiness for integration into wearable and medical imaging systems. Additionally, most of the previously designed antennas lacked multi-band reconfigurability, therefore undermining the versatility of these designs towards other medical communication standards. The work presents a compact antipodal directional UWB antenna with a substrate size of 50 × 32 mm², which is designed on an FR4 substrate of dielectric constant of 4.4. Features comprise a peak gain of 6.5 dB, radiation efficiency of 90%, and excellent UWB performance from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz. The design integrated multiple advanced methodologies such as microwave tomography for high-resolution medical imaging, inkjet printed flexible substrates for wearable devices, and PIN diode-based reconfigurability for multi-resonant frequency operation. Microwave imaging offered improved spatial resolution to be at around ∼1–2 mm and provided soft tissue contrast for early disease detection while ensuring miniaturized antennas along with exceptional flexibility and robustness with the inkjet printing method. Compactness, flexibility, and multi-band features of the proposed antenna make it especially suited for wearable health monitoring devices & deployments. Also the potential impacts of this work are highly significant due to higher superior performances of the antenna operating in the UWB band, which ensures precise imaging in medical applications. The reconfigurability of the PIN diode, that enables it to dynamically switch between UWB, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi frequencies, enhances compatibility with different biomedical applications. Integration of the two functions addresses some of the critical challenges in the design of medical devices, hence ushering diagnostic and monitoring systems to the next generation.