Yuto Shimizu, Shun Hiyama1, Daisuke Anzai, Mauricio Kugler1, Akira Iwata1, Jianqing Wang
13:25 - 14:15 | Thu 16 Feb | Ballroom D | ThRPF.21
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.