Review of Antenna Technologies and Designs for Various Wearable and Integrated Applications

Numerous wearable, on-body, helmet-integrated, and glove-integrated antennas have been designed, developed and evaluated in the literature for various applications such as position location, search and rescue, and professional mobile radio and tactical military-communication. Although these antennas had adequate performance per application, their vast differences in size, shape, dielectric material, and technology, make it difficult to identify a systematic antenna selection approach for a given application. In this paper, various wearable and integrated antennas are reviewed based on their applications, operating frequencies, sizes, antenna technologies, materials, and performances. Miniaturization and polarization techniques are also reviewed and discussed.