| Summary: | There is an increasing need for small, conformal and multifunctional antennas that can satisfy all sorts of communication needs and varieties of portable devices and sensors for monitoring and information gathering. One area that has received much attention in recent years include antennas for body-centric applications that can be integrated into body-worn and implantable medical devices (IMDs). Continuous reduction in size for body-worn and IMDs require ultra-small antennas for embedded applications. However, the designers of body-centric antennas are faced with numerous challenges in dealing with issues related to miniaturisation, biocompatibility, patient safety, detuning and additional challenges imposed by the human body, which significantly affects the performance of the antennas. In order to have efficient wireless communication systems, it is important to understand and characterise the effects of the human body on antenna elements, the radio propagation channel parameters and the overall system performance. The thesis is focused on design and development of antennas for body-centric applications, which involve on-body, off-body and implantable devices. Numerical simulations of the proposed antennas on human tissue-mimicking materials (phantom) were performed to determine how the human tissues affect the antenna performance. A series of measurements have been made on human body phantom made in the laboratory as well as real on-body human subject applications. Based on the numerical and statistical data obtained from these studies various antenna designs have been proposed for body-centric applications including applications in implantable devices in the Medical Implant and Communication Service band (MICS) 402-405 MHz, on-body applications in the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band at 2.45 GHz and Ultra-wideband (UWB) spectrum 3.1 GHz - 10.6 GHz for on-body and microwave imaging applications.
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