Design and Performance Evaluation of Wearable BLE Antenna for a Localization System of Aged Wanderer

Details

13:25 - 14:15 | Thu 16 Feb | Ballroom D | ThRPF.21

Session: Rapid Fire Session 02: Sensor Informatics I

Abstract

In recent years, body area networks (BANs) are attracting much attention} in the field of medical and healthcare. In BANs' applications, wearable BANs are used around the human body. Additionally, it is becoming a social problem of the increase of aged wanderers of dementia. To solve this problem, we are developing a watching system where wearable bluetooth low energy (BLE) devices are used for localizing the aged wanderers. To realize this system, it is necessary to design a BLE antenna which can operate well on the human body. For this aim, we designed an inverted F antenna in the BLE band and evaluate its S11 performance and radiation pattern around the human torso model using the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. Simulated S11 was lower than -10 dB in the BLE band. In the antenna radiation performance, we obtained maximum gain of 4.2 dBi. Finally, we measured receive signal strength indication (RSSI) performance of the BLE module with the use of the designed antenna as compared with commercial BLE module. This result shows that developed BLE module has improved the RSSI of around 10 dB as compared with commercial BLE module.