Wearable Soft Grid Array Antenna for S-band 5G Communication

Potential convergence of wearable and epidermal antennas for battery-less communication with the emerging 5G framework, may boost the ultrafast and delay-free monitoring of biophysical parameters. 3.6 GHz epidermal antennas have already been demonstrated to possibly provide the same performance of a conventional UHF RFID link but with much larger band. Even better performance can be achieved by using wearable grid-arrays that may increase the read distance up to 6m in battery-less mode while keeping the feeding and fabrication complexity low. Here, the optimal performance of on-skin grid-arrays are investigated and a first prototype is manufactured and tested onto a body phantom

Epidermal and Conformal Electronics for BioSensing Applications

This chapter is concerned with low power epidermally or conformally mounted flexible sensing tags that use passive backscattered communications links with the UHF Gen2 RFID protocol (865–928 MHz). Very low-profile polymer or fabric substrate skin mountable UHF RFID tag designs are introduced, with proposed fabrication by inkjet printing, and incorporation of sensing, while alternatively, integrated, flexible silicon NFC sensing systems at 13.56 MHz have been pioneered

Upper-bound Performances of RFID Epidermal Sensor Networks at 5G Frequencies

5G will play a key role in developing high speed wearable and epidermal electronics for healthcare applications such as patient monitoring, tele-surgery, and augmented sensorial abilities (both for humans and robots). At the same time, developing a 5G-RFID system based on backscattering communication will help reducing the power consumption and lowering the electronic complexity. Nevertheless, the high path losses and the strong electromagnetic interactions of the skin might severely limit ranges and performances of epidermal RFIDs operating at 5G frequencies. In this paper, the effects of the human skin on the link budget of epidermal RFID dipoles at microwave and mmWave frequencies are investigated through numerical simulations. Results show that an epidermal RFID sensor tags can reach ranges comparable with UHF systems by using either a single dipole at 5.8 GHz or a 23-element array of dipoles at 60 GHz when using the currently available chip sensitivities (-15 dBm) and reader antenna gains (6 dBi). Smaller antenna sizes of a 5G RFID sensor will allow the integration of tags in new ubiquitous non-invasive epidermal and wearable electronics, while the high frequencies will enable tracking with mm- and micro-scale resolutions for medical applications (e.g.: micro-ablation or muscular and neural rehabilitation)