Analysis of the Antenna Performance for Wireless Implantable Body Area Network Applications

Abstract

Wireless implantable body area network (WiBAN) is useful in health monitoring systems especially for the purpose of medical diagnoses, such as breast cancer, heart attack and high blood pressure. The performances of implantable antenna in a selected part of the human body are presented in this paper. The antenna performances, in terms of gain, efficiency, return loss and specific absorption rate (SAR), were investigated at selected parts of human body (hand ,chest, leg, heart and skull) by using human voxel model inbuilt in the CST Microwave Studio software. Investigations have shown that the human hand model is the most suitable place for implanting the antenna. The antenna is implanted under the skin so that the signal propagation path length to the base station at free space environment is considerably short. Besides, human hand model has a less complex structure as it consists of skin, fat, muscle, blood and bone. The antenna’s gain, efficiency and Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) are -11.92dBi, 1.30 % and 0.09 W/kg respectively; which confirms the safety of the antenna usage. The results of performance evaluations have shown that the proposed antenna is a suitable candidate for WiBAN applications.