Active textile antennas in professional garments for sensing, localisation and communication

New wireless wearable monitoring systems integrated in professional garments require a high degree of reliability and autonomy. Active textile antenna systems may serve as platforms for body-centric sensing, localisation, and wireless communication systems, in the meanwhile being comfortable and invisible to the wearer. We present a new dedicated comprehensive design paradigm and combine this with adapted signal-processing techniques that greatly enhance the robustness and the autonomy of these systems. On the one hand, the large amount of real estate available in professional rescue worker garments may be exploited to deploy multiple textile antennas. On the other hand, the size of each radiator may be designed large enough to ensure high radiation efficiency when deployed on the body. This antenna area is then reused by placing active electronics directly underneath and energy harvesters directly on top of the antenna patch. We illustrate this design paradigm by means of recent textile antenna prototypes integrated in professional garments, providing sensing, positioning, and communication capabilities. In particular, a novel wearable active Galileo E1-band antenna is presented and fully characterized, including noise figure, and linearity performance

The JNK Inhibitor XG-102 Protects against TNBS-Induced Colitis

The c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK)-inhibiting peptide D-JNKI-1, syn. XG-102 was tested for its therapeutic potential in acute inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in mice. Rectal instillation of the chemical irritant trinitrobenzene sulfonic acid (TNBS) provoked a dramatic acute inflammation in the colon of 7–9 weeks old mice. Coincident subcutaneous application of 100 µg/kg XG-102 significantly reduced the loss of body weight, rectal bleeding and diarrhoea. After 72 h, the end of the study, the colon was removed and immuno-histochemically analysed. XG-102 significantly reduced (i) pathological changes such as ulceration or crypt deformation, (ii) immune cell pathology such as infiltration and presence of CD3- and CD68-positive cells, (iii) the production of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α in colon tissue cultures from TNBS-treated mice, (iv) expression of Bim, Bax, FasL, p53, and activation of caspase 3, (v) complexation of JNK2 and Bim, and (vi) expression and activation of the JNK substrate and transcription factor c-Jun. A single application of subcutaneous XG-102 was at least as effective or even better depending on the outcome parameter as the daily oral application of sulfasalazine used for treatment of IBD

Design of a Circularly Polarized Galileo E6-Band Textile Antenna by Dedicated Multiobjective Constrained Pareto Optimization

Designing textile antennas for real-life applications requires a design strategy that is able to produce antennas that are optimized over a wide bandwidth for often conflicting characteristics, such as impedance matching, axial ratio, efficiency, and gain, and, moreover, that is able to account for the variations that apply for the characteristics of the unconventional materials used in smart textile systems. In this paper, such a strategy, incorporating a multiobjective constrained Pareto optimization, is presented and applied to the design of a Galileo E6-band antenna with optimal return loss and wide-band axial ratio characteristics. Subsequently, different prototypes of the optimized antenna are fabricated and measured to validate the proposed design strategy

Highly flexible, low loss feed structure for active wearable aperture coupled antennas with radically trimmed substrate

In an effort to improve the flexibility of active wearable aperture coupled patch antennas applied in smart textile systems, a laser shaping technique for the antenna feed substrate is presented. The technique consists of cutting away most of the antenna feed substrate, up to very close distances to the microstrip interconnects and in close vicinity to the coupling slots in the antenna ground plane. One the one hand, this changes the effective dielectric constant of the substrate, influencing the performance of the impedance-controlled designed RF circuitry, and the aperture coupling between the feed lines and the radiating structure. On the other hand, the removal of lossy, textile substrate material surrounding the RF interconnections reduces losses in the feed circuit. By taking this altered substrate into account during the design stage, high performance, light-weight and flexible active wearable antenna designs can be implemented. In a smart textile system, an unobtrusive integration of the different components is essential. However, this objective is not straightforward. In the active antenna’s fabrication process, the RF circuitry is directly integrated onto the flexible antenna. This offers increased performance by eliminating lossy wearable RF connections between the antenna and the active circuit, and it enables full-wave/circuit co-design, e.g. by matching the antenna impedance directly to the active circuit’s optimal input impedance [1]. Moreover, this approach improves robustness by reducing potential weak links between the antenna interconnects and the active circuitry, in the meanwhile making the complete wearable system more compact by eliminating the need for separate antennas and circuits. Copper-on-polyimide films offer an ideal solution for the RF circuit integrated in an active wearable antenna, allowing an accurate fabrication of the flexible RF interconnections. However, when laminated onto a textile substrate, the flexibility is greatly reduced, and the textile substrate introduces dielectric losses. Therefore, we propose a technique involving the laser cutting of the textile substrate around the RF circuitry, effectively removing the substrate up to very close distances to the conductive structures. The effects of the reduced substrate on the performance of the RF interconnections in the feed circuit and the coupling of the feed lines to the radiating element will be modeled by means of full 3D simulations and simplified planar 3D simulations. The full 3D simulations explicitly model the cut substrate, whereas the planar 3D simulations model the original, uncut substrate with an adjusted dielectric constant to allow for a faster design. These simulation appraoches will be validated by means of measurements on a manufactured prototype

JNK2-Bim co-precipitation.

<p>JNK1 and JNK2 immunoprecipitates (IP) from colon tissue homogenates were analyzed by Western blotting with an anti-Bim antibody. Pounceau staining demonstrated equal loading (data not shown).</p

Representative CD3 and CD68 immunofluorescence.

<p>Representative CD3 (left) and CD68 (right) immunofluorescence of the distal colon from normal mice, trinitrobenzene sulfonic acid (TNBS) administration and treatment with sc. 100 µg/kg XG-102.</p

c-Jun and phospho-c-Jun.

<p>Western blot analysis of c-Jun and phospho-c-Jun in colon homogenates from untreated controls (co) and 12 h or 24 h following trinitrobenzene sulfonic acid (TNBS) administration without or with XG-102 (100 µg/kg sc.). These blots are representative of 3 independent experiments.</p