Design Aspects of Body-Worn UWB Antenna for Body-Centric Communication: A Review

The body-worn antenna and body-centric communication (BCC) system has received much attention over the past few years for medical healthcare monitoring applications. Such systems are gaining much concern for other applications like sports and fitness, gaming, lifestyle and entertainment. The speedy raising insalubrious environment, where the peoples have less focus towards own health and physical fitness has impelled the need of caregivers and doctors. In addition, the increase in the elderly population and numerous chronic diseases fortify the need of real-time healthcare system to monitor numerous physiological sign at their doorstep. The healthcare monitoring system is advancing through an improvement which incorporate context-aware, real-time, and continuous monitoring of several vital signs even without hospitalization. Advances in sensing, embedded technologies, and wireless transmission technologies coupled with the miniaturization have led to a keen interest in antennas that can be mounted in, on or around the human body for several applications. These applications have included wireless body area networks. This paper reviews the existing body-worn antennas for the BCC system in terms of design aspects, performance parameter characterization, human phantom modeling, and related basic numerical approaches in order to tackle the design challenges of body-worn UWB antennas.