Novel Wearable Radio-Frequency Antennas Based on Woven Conductive Fabrics

In this study, a new practical method for fast fabrication of low-cost wearable antennas is introduced. The antennas are directly cut from woven conductive fabrics, while their terminals are connected to microchips by using a repair glue. Following simple trials to demonstrate the fabrication procedure, high-performance radio-frequency antennas that are suitable for the proposed method are designed in a simulation environment based on the multilevel fast multipole algorithm and genetic algorithms. Simulations and measurements on fabricated samples demonstrate very good agreement, showing the feasibility of low-cost, lightweight, flexible, and wearable antennas to be fabricated via the proposed approach.