Wearable antennas for applications in remote assistance to elderly people

Abstract

An effective remote monitoring of elderly people in telehealth applications requires their everyday activities not to be affected by the monitoring. In this regard, a possible strategy is to make sure that the components (i.e. sensor and antenna) necessary to carry out such monitoring are seamlessly integrated within the elderly's daily routine. Starting from these considerations, the present paper addresses the fabrication of wearable antennas that can be fully integrated with clothes and that can be used for remotely transmitting/receiving the sensor data. In particular, in this work, two different wearable antenna fabrication techniques (namely the use of non-woven conductive fabrics in combination with a cutting plotter and the embroidery of conductive threads) are investigated. The obtained numerical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed fabrication techniques and strategies are very flexible, and can allow obtaining low-cost wearable antenna with tailored performance according to the specific application requirements.