RFID Antennas for Healthcare Applications

Abstract

In recent years healthcare related problems are becoming much critical. It has put forward the necessity of uninterrupted monitoring of patients and their health conditions. Nowadays, computer based clinical systems hardly perform much role in the efficient implementation of clinical work as per the demand. Similarly, the portable electronic equipments for monitoring health are also not as handy in retaining health records, scrutinizing information and in providing assistance as per the analysis. The current days Electronic Patient Records System (EPRS) is confined to the hospital only, its database is not being used globally. Observing the real-time parameters, feeds are prerequisite for an updated EPRS by a dynamic modification of EPRS, which would be much helpful in assisting the specialist in prevailing health conditions of concerned patient with a clear insight. Once the accessibility of this updated EPRS is extended globally which could be much helpful in assisting the patient’s health conditions. Following the several challenges in monitoring health and medical assistance and ensuring the above line of action, different modern hand mounted devices along with biomedical sensors are being developed by using proper hardware and software design. In this thesis the strategy of a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based antenna design has been discussed which can be incorporated as a reader antenna inside the hospital or health centres for monitoring health & giving assistance to the patient, medical personnel and researchers as well. A Reader antenna array for RFID system with circular polarization (CP) and having high gain is presented in this thesis. This antenna has two main radiating patches which are connected in parallel. The antenna is designed on a FR4 epoxy substrate with dielectric constant (𝜀𝑟 ) of 4.4 and loss tangent (tanδ) of 0.02 and is very compact in size. The antenna is provided with an inset feed line for excitation which is operating at 2.4 GHz resonant frequency in the ISM band. The dimension of the antenna is 0.96𝜆 × 0.585𝜆 × 0.012𝜆, where λ represents the wavelength of the resonant frequency. The gain of the above antenna is 6.1 dB with a reflection coefficient (𝑆11) of −17.4 dB. This Antenna system is capable of reading multiple RFID tags within its operating bandwidth. To investigate the performance of the proposed antenna, different optimization techniques are applied with experimental demonstration. The axial ratio value of the proposed antenna array is 0.3 dB which makes this antenna suitable candidate for healthcare applications.