Certain investigations on the design of Microwave antennas and terahertz Sensors for biomedical applications

Abstract

The focus of this research work is on the design of antennas and sensors for biomedical applications. The increase in the population of people aged above 60 years increases the demand for hospital facilities. Due to this demand, the researchers interest has turned towards remote health care monitoring. The remote health care monitoring system is implemented using Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). In WBAN, the antennas and sensors play a vital role by sensing and transmitting the biological data to the physician. This thesis reports on the design, fabrication, measurement and analysis of Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) WBAN antennas. It has been followed by the design and analysis of Terahertz (THz) sensors for futuristic biomedical sensing applications. newlineThe work starts with a detailed discussion on WBAN communication and its types. Among the three types of communication, the thesis is focused on the design of antennas for in-body and off-body communication. As per Federal Communications Commission (FCC), WBAN antennas need to cover the UWB range of 3.1 to 10.6 GHz. A detailed study on UWB and WBAN is discussed. Henceforth, the study of various microwave antenna designs using different materials and structures for wireless body-centric communication is conducted. Later, considering the biomedical application in the futuristic world, the design of the THz bio-sensor is proposed in this thesis. Since THz operates in the range of 0.1 THz to 10 THz, the bio-sensor is non-invasive and overcomes the ill effects on the human body due to the conventional sensors. Followed by this, the design and analysis of antennas for body-centric communication and THz bio-sensor for detecting various refractive index-based biological components are explained in this thesis. newlineThe work initiates with the design of a quasi-circular monopole antenna for off-body communication and a quasi-Yagi antenna for on-body communication newline