A Miniaturized Invasive Antenna Study for a Better Performance in Medical Application

Today with the development of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) and the miniaturization of electronic devices, the use of implantable antennas for therapeutic purposes became a reality. However, the design of antennas in the context of WBAN still suffers from some shortcomes mainly in terms of matching. In this paper, a miniaturized slotted rectangular Planar Inverted-F Antenna (PIFA) was proposed for WBAN Medical Implantable Communication Services (MICS) band. The antenna was positioned in a chest model in the context of a cardiac activity monitoring. The PIFA was implanted at 11 positions within the muscle to observe its characteristics and its relative response. The main objective of the proposed approach is to get a miniaturized antenna and to find the most appropriate location for its operation. The fat thickness was varied in order to detect its influence on the antenna characteristics. A comparative study was carried out between our antenna and others suggested in the state-of-the-art. The obtained results show a good performance of the proposed small-sized PIFA of 11.9 x 14.7 x 1.305 mm3, equivalent to 0.0159 λ0 x 0.0197 λ0 x 0.00175 λ0.