Wearable Yagi Microstrip Antenna for Telemedicine Applications
Haider R. Khaleel*, Hussain M. Al-Rizzo, Daniel G. Rucker, and Taha A. Elwi
University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR 72204
*Email: hrkhaleel@ualr.edu, Phone no.: 501-569-3100
Abstract— This paper presents a button shaped antenna
based on a microstrip Yagi array. The proposed antenna is
suitable for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) and
telemedicine applications operating at 2.45 GHz. Antenna
properties, such as far-field radiation patterns, coupling
coefficient, measured by the scattering parameter S11, and gain
are provided. Moreover, the simulated performance of the
proposed antenna is compared to circular and rectangular
patch button shaped antennas having similar sizes. Design and
simulations are performed using CST Microwave Studio
software which is based on the Finite Integration Technique
(FIT). The proposed antenna achieved a gain of 6.7 dB, (F/B)
ratio of 11.7 dB and a semi-directional radiation pattern
required for on body and off body applications.
Index Terms------ Wearable antenna, Button antenna, Microstrip
Yagi array.
I. INTRODUCTION
R ECENT years have witnessed intensive research
activities in the field of wearable antennas due to their
potential in broad spectrum of applications such as
Satellite communication [1], telemedicine [2], entertainment,
GPS [3], and RFID [4]. Telemedicine is becoming of more
importance due to the increasing need of remote human vital
signs monitoring in many applications such as seniors
monitoring, post surgery patients recovery tracking and
monitoring the body performance during exercise [5]. The
health parameters that may be transmitted wirelessly to
remote stations (off body mode) in telemedicine systems
range from simple heart rate, blood pressure, body
temperature to blood glucose levels and ECG wave forms. In
addition to off body applications, on body mode is also
necessary for communication between sensors devices
located on or within the patient's body [6]. Therefore a
reliable low profile antenna is required for best performance.
Various types and design approaches of wearable antennas
are being proposed including: Electro-textile [7], microstrip
patches [8], buttons antennas [9], wearable MIMO systems
[10], or hybrid systems based on one or more of such
designs [11].
Obviously, wearable antennas are required to be small size,
lightweight, but robust at the same time. They also have to
be comfortable and conformal to the body shape, yet they
must maintain high performance in terms of reliability and
efficiency. Electro textile based antennas seem to be a low-
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profile solution for wearable application; however, they are
more prone to discontinuities in substrate material, fluids
absorption, bending, twisting, and compression [6]. On the
other hand, button antennas are constructed using highly
rigid substrates which tend to be robust, long-term feed
connection compared to textile antennas which have a
significant problem in practical wearable system design [9].
Furthermore, microstrip button antennas offer favorable
characteristics such as lower profile construction, low cost,
ease of fabrication, capability of integration with clothing.
Previous work [12]-[14] was primarily focused on
achieving omni-directional radiation pattern. However, a
semi-directional radiation pattern of the patch antenna is
favorably desired over omni-directional radiation for
wearable applications, to avoid unnecessary radiation
exposure to the human body and radiation losses [10].
In array applications, mutual coupling effect is often
considered undesirable, since it reduces the antenna gain and
increases the sidelobe level [15]. However, mutual coupling
is responsible for antenna performance enhancement in some
applications. For example, in the case of Yagi microstrip
antenna which was first introduced by Huang in 1989 [15],
parasitic patches are placed around a driven element to
function as reflectors and directors to increase the gain. This
design consisted of four elements of different sizes that were
capacitively coupled to each other. However, one of the
major limitations of this design was the low front-to-back
(F/B) ratio (as low as 5 dB). After Huang's proposal many
contributions in the development, design and optimization of
Yagi microstrip antenna arrays have taken place [16]–[20].
These designs are a derivative of the original Yagi
microstrip antenna array and achieved a high gain and a high
F/B ratio compared to the original design.
In this work, we propose a button shaped antenna based on
Yagi microstrip and compare it with antennas having the
same shape and size based on conventional rectangular and
circular patch microstrip. Our proposed design achieves a
higher directivity and F/B ratio with a semi-directional
radiation pattern which is aimed at reducing the back
radiation to the user's body.
In Section II we present the description for our proposed
design and the principle of operation. In section III, we
discuss its radiation characteristic and performance
comparison with the two standard antennas. Finally
conclusions are given in section IV.
280 RWS 2010
 II. ANTENNA DESIGN AND PRINCIPLE OF OPERATION
Antenna size is considered as a crucial design parameter in
wearable applications; hence, maximum miniaturization to
the ground plane dimensions must be achieved. However,
there is a tradeoff between the ground plane size and the F/B
ratio. In this work, we introduce a button antenna of 36 mm
ground plane diameter to keep the design size reasonable
with an acceptable F/B ratio. The proposed design is a
derivative of the original Yagi microstrip antenna array
presented in [15] in which a high directivity is achieved by
the constructive coupling of the Yagi microstrip structures
around the driven element acting as reflectors and directors.
The antenna design was optimized using CST Microwave
Studio. The antenna ground plane is modeled as a thin
circular sheet of perfect electric conductor (PEC) with a
diameter of 36 mm and thickness of 0.05 mm, followed by a
substrate with a thickness of 0.85 mm and dielectric constant
of 6.6 on top then the PEC patch elements on top of the
substrate. The driven element was designed to resonate at
2.45 GHz.
Fig.1 displays the front view of the proposed design for the
Yagi microstrip button antenna.
Fig. 1. Button antenna based on Yagi microstrip array (Front view).
The dimensions of the patch elements are listed in table 1:
TABLE I
DIMENSIONS OF YAGI MICROSTRIP BUTTON ANTENNA
Element Length Width Thickness
Driven element 21 mm 18 mm 0.05 mm
Directors 4 mm 8 mm 0.05 mm
Reflectors 2.2 mm 7.8 mm 0.05 mm
Extra coupling elements 16 mm 5 mm 0.05 mm
The distance between the driven element and the reflectors is
0.4 mm, while the distance between the directors and the
driven element is 0.6 mm. These values were chosen to
optimize the antenna gain and F/B ratio.
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The distance between the two director elements is 1.8 mm.
This value is optimized to achieve the highest gain. The
presence of the two extra coupling elements on the sides
of the driven element increased the gain by 0.8 dB. The
thickness of the substrate is chosen as 0.85 mm. A thicker
substrate will lead to a larger bandwidth, but the F/B ratio
would be reduced due to the increased surface waves in the
substrate.
The location of the feeding port is optimized through
simulations to achieve the best impedance matching.
The high F/B ratio is obtained by the effect of the two
director patches; they also contribute to the enhanced
directivity.
The effect of the reflector patch is mainly to reduce the
back radiation. Through simulation, the length of the
reflector is designed to be almost ¼ its width, according to
[15] a shorter length would increase the back radiation and a
larger length is unnecessary for reducing the F/B ratio, it will
only increase the size of the design, while the performance
would stay the same.
III. RADIATION CHARACTERISTICS AND PERFORMANCE
COMPARISON
The simulated return loss versus frequency for the proposed
antenna is presented in Fig. 2.
Fig. 2. Scattering parameter S11 for the Yagi microstrip button antenna.
The return loss for the antenna is -19.8 dB at 2.45 GHz,
while the achieved -10 dB bandwidth is 8 MHz.
For performance comparison, circular and rectangular
patch antennas are simulated with the same dimensions and
substrate material. Both antennas were designed to
resonate at 2.45 GHz. The two antennas achieved a gain of
3.7 dB and 3.2 dB and a F/B ratio of 1.1 dB and 1.3 dB for
the circular and the rectangular patches respectively. Fig.3
and Fig.4 show the radiation patterns in polar form for the
circular and rectangular patch antennas respectively.
 (a)
Fig.3. Radiation pattern for the circular patch, Phi=0.

(b)
Fig.4. Radiation pattern for the rectangular patch, Phi=0.

On the other hand, the proposed antenna achieved a gain of

6.7 dB and 11.7 F/B ratio. Fig.5. shows the radiation pattern
for the Yagi microstrip antenna in polar form for Phi=0,
Phi=90 and 3D form.
It can be clearly seen that the proposed design has a semi
directional radiation pattern, i.e.: the energy will be radiated
in the normal and tangential direction to the patch elements
surface, which perfectly serves the on-body and off-body
applications.

IV. CONCLUSION
A button shaped antenna based on Yagi microstrip array
has been presented and compared with two common types of
microstrip antenna; circular and rectangular patch. The
proposed antenna achieved a higher gain and front to back
(c)
ratio compared to the two antennas, in addition to the semi-
directional radiation pattern which is preferred over the Fig.5. Radiation pattern for Yagi microstrip button antenna (a) Polar form,
omni-directional pattern to overcome unnecessary radiation Phi=0, (b) Polar form, Phi=90, (c) 3D form.
to the user's body and satisfies the requirement for on-body
and off-body applications. A gain of 6.7 dB and a F/B ratio
of 11.7 dB is obtained. The antenna resonates at 2.45GHz,
which is suitable for telemedicine applications.

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was funded in part by the National Science
Foundation Grants (NSF EPSCoR) EPS-0701890 and CNS-
0619069.

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