On the Study of Contemporary Wideband On-body Antenna-Based Sensor Designs for Bio-medical Applications

On-body antenna design attracts a lot of attention of researchers from different sectors across the globe. In this connection, the healthcare professionals are keenly observing the evolution of biomedical systems from day one hoping that their apprehensions for the system gets resolved by the designers at the earliest. After the COVID-19 breakout, the body-centric communication (BCC) has gained attention of both the health care professionals and patients simultaneously. This paper is a step towards addressing the concerns of the health practitioners by providing the details of the evolution in the designs of on-body antennas and the recent advancements to the researchers working in the wireless body area network (WBAN) applications. Antennas have been categorized on the basis of antenna topology, operational bandwidth range, substrate material, reconfigurability etc. Metamaterial-based body worn antennas appear to be game changer in this domain as these structures ensure high gain, miniaturization and high radiation efficiency. An in-depth study is done for the specific absorption rate (SAR) for the wearable antennas. In addition to this, numerical modelling of the human body is also summarized.