Recent developments in antennas with full ground planes for Wireless Body Area Networks (Invited Paper)

This paper highlights recent developments in antennas with full ground planes, which have been designed for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). These antennas are designed to provide single/dual band operation in 2.4GHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band and 4.9GHz public safety wireless local area network (WLAN)/5GHz IEEE 802.11 WLAN bands. They have significant advantages of compactness, wide radiation pattern over the body surface, and less sensitivity to the variation of the gap between the antenna and the human body. These advantages make them suitable for on-body communications and wearable applications.