Abstract
A novel, compact, monopole apple-shaped, triple-band metamaterial-printed wearable antenna backed by a uniplanar compact electromagnetic bandgap (UC-EBG) structure is introduced in this paper for wearable wireless and medical body area network (WBAN/MBAN) applications. A tri-band UC-EBG structure has been utilized as a ground plane to minimize the impact of antenna radiation on the human body and improve antenna performance for the proposed wearable antenna. Metamaterial triangular complementary split ring resonators (TCSRRs) are incorporated into the antenna and UC-EBG structure, resulting in a compact UC-EBG-backed antenna with an overall size of 39 × 39 × 2.84 mm3 (0.41 λg × 0.41 λg × 0.029 λg). The printed textile antenna operates at 2.45 GHz for the wireless local area network (WLAN), 3.5 GHz for 5G new radio (NR), and 5.8 GHz for the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) bands with improved gain and high-efficiency values. Furthermore, the performance of the antenna is analyzed on the human body, where three models of curved body parts are considered: a child’s arm (worst case) with a 40 mm radius, an adult’s arm with a 60 mm radius, and an adult’s leg with a 70 mm radius. The results demonstrate that the proposed antenna is an attractive candidate for wearable healthcare and fitness monitoring devices and other WBAN/MBAN applications due to its compact size, high performance, and low SAR values.