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This paper presents a novel miniaturized antenna with a dual-band resonance covering the medical body-area network (MBAN) and a 5.8-GHz industrial scientific medical band. Owning to its stacked-patch structure, the proposed antenna generates an omnidirectional radiation pattern with vertical polarization and a broadside radiation pattern with circular polarization at the two bands, respectively, thus fulfilling the requirements for both onand off-body channels simultaneously. This antenna is designed on a multilayer tissue model, and is then validated on the Gustav voxel model. The footprint of the proposed antenna is only 0.18λ0× 0.18λ0× 0.04λ0. The proposed design is fabricated and its performance is investigated in various scenarios. When measured on the pork trunk, impedance bandwidths of 2.8% at the lower band and 9.0% at the upper band are achieved, fully covering the two bands. Besides, the transmission performance at the MBAN band is also studied by conducting measurements on the human body, and the measurement results agree well with the simulation. The obtained robust antenna performance reveals that the proposed design is suitable for MBAN applications.
Zhu et al. (2016) studied this question.