Energy-Efficient Battery-Less Wearable Antenna Integrated with RF Energy Harvesting Modules for Long-Term Health Monitoring in IoT Healthcare Ecosystems
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31838/NJAP/07.03.25Keywords:
Wearable antenna, RF energy harvesting, battery-less sensors, IoT healthcare, textile antenna, long-term monitoring.Abstract
The need to engage in continuous physiological monitoring in Internet-of-Things (IoT) healthcare systems requires the wearable devices to operate over a long period without a battery change. Nevertheless, the traditional battery operated wearables have poor lifetime, higher maintenance rates, and cannot be reliably used in extended medical applications. To combat this, a battery-free wearable antenna along with RF energy harvesting (RFEH) modules is proposed to be used on sustainable health monitoring solutions. The proposed system uses an adaptable dual-band textile antenna, which is optimised to receive and transmit RF-to-DC, and works in the 900 MHz ISM band and the 2.45 GHz Wi-Fi band two sources of ambient RF that can be found in the indoor and urban settings. A multi-source rectifier, impedance-adaptive matching network and a power accumulator architecture provide physiological sensors (temperature, ECG, motion) functionality at a constant low power level. The antenna exhibits constant omnidirectional gain in the face of body deformations of a hybrid conductive textile-polymer architecture. Extensive simulations and experiments show enhanced power density that is harvested, reduced specific absorption rate (SAR), increased RFDC efficiency and strength when bent, strained, and loaded on the body. The technology allows continuous health monitoring in the form of IoT systems that can be maintained without interruption, which has high possibilities of being integrated in future medical wearables.
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