Compact multi-band PIFA with meandered radiator for wireless brain implant communications

Abstract

Implantable devices bring promising prospects for monitoring physiological data in health care services. To build up a proper wireless data link, designing a miniaturized antenna is prime importance. The objective of this paper is designing a small meandered multi-resonant planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) for wireless brain implants. The proposed PIFA resonates on both, the medical implant communication services (MICS) band of 402 MHz and industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) bands containing the frequency ranges of 902 MHz and 2.4 GHz. Methods of meandering and shorting the radiating element to the ground plane lead to miniaturize the antenna to the volume of 12.6×19×1.25 mm3. A seven-layer human head model is utilized for optimizing and characterizing the proposed PIFA numerically. Overall, we attain a compact multi-band implantable PIFA with –42.3 dBi gain at 402 MHz, –24.2 dBi gain at 902 MHz, and –21.6 dBi gain at 2.4 GHz.