Wearable textile EBG‐inspired bandwidth‐enhanced patch antenna

An electromagnetic bandgap (EBG)‐inspired low‐profile wideband textile antenna is presented. By partially surrounding a standard textile patch antenna with mushroom EBG cells, a significant enhancement of the 10 dB impedance bandwidth is obtained. In particular, whereas a standard textile patch antenna exhibits a typical 10 dB bandwidth of 6% for a substrate thickness of 0.04 , the proposed technique extends the 10 dB impedance bandwidth to 32%. Notably, the relatively large impedance bandwidth is achieved without extracting a heavy cost in terms of fabrication or design complexity. To make the design amenable for textile implementation, as opposed to more conventional designs which use EBG cells as a replacement for a ground plane, the proposed design hinges on the patch antenna being coplanar with a single quasi‐ring of coplanar EBG cells. The proposed antenna design is validated through measurements in free space and on‐body, where it is demonstrated to be robust to the effects of bending in the two principal planes.