Extremely low profile flexible antenna for medical body area networks

Medical Body Area Networks (MBAN) are widely used in healthcare systems employing in- and on-body applications. An extremely low profile patch antenna for the MBANs is presented in this paper. The antenna consists of two flexible printed circuit boards (FPCB) separated by an air gap and uses a rectangular radiating patch with four slots. Two variants of the antenna having single and dual band operation are discussed. The single band antenna operates at 2.4 GHz while the dual band antenna works at frequencies of 2.4 GHz and 4.3 GHz. Both versions of the proposed antenna offer good bandwidth, high gain and radiation coverage for the MBAN applications.