International Journal of Engineering and Technical Research (IJETR) ISSN: 2321-0869 (O) 2454-4698 (P), Volume-3, Issue-10, October 2015 237 www.erpublication.org Abstract— The Ultra wide-band Wireless Body Area Networks have rapidly progressed in recent years, due to its high data rate transmission capabilities with low power spectral densities. Here an implantable compact, low profile microstrip patch antenna for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is presented, which is operated at Ultra wide-band (UWB) frequency from 4.4 GHz to 6.8 GHz with the bandwidth of 2.4 GHz. The proposed antenna is characterized in free space (air) and lossy environment by submerged in to soybean oil as human fat tissues. The proposed antenna is implantable in human body for monitoring the patient’s health. The proposed antenna is fabricated on FR4-eproxy substrate with a dielectric constant of 4.4 and 1.6 mm thickness. The overall size of antenna is 13 mm × 13 mm × 1.6 mm. The parameter of proposed antenna was simulated using HFSS 13.0 software in term of return loss, gain, VSWR, and radiation pattern. Radiation loss and operating bandwidth of the antenna were measured using vector network analyzer (VNA). The antenna is suitable for WBAN applications such as malignant tumor detection, heart attack and high blood pressure measurement etc. Keywords- WBAN; implantable; Ultra wideband; medical application; patch antenna. I. INTRODUCTION The networking and communications with the use of wearable and implantable wireless sensors to human-to-human and human self is referred to body-centric wireless communications. Its area is combination of Wireless Body-Area Networks (WBANs), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) [1]. A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) system is a set of various miniaturized and low power independent node and sensors. In order to provide smart health care these nodes are attached to human body as wearable or implantable devices. Moreover, a wireless body area network (WBAN) systems use for multiple applications such as home and health care, medicine, sports, multimedia, biomedical, commercial, and military services. These devices are attached on or implanted in the body which is capable of establishing a wireless communication link [3]. Implantable devices provide continuous health monitoring and real-time feedback to the user or medical personnel. It can be able to reside for long period of time in patient body for monitoring the health. In order to monitor a patient’s health status, implanted devices are used to collect various physiological parameters in medical diagnosis and wirelessly transmit that information to external medical devices [4]. During the previous research Reena Sharma, M.Tech student Arya Collage of Engineering and IT, Jaipur Dr. Kirti Vyas, Professor (ECE Department) ACEIT, Jaipur. Dr. R.P Yadav, Professor (ECE Department) MNIT, Jaipur topics, the number of papers covered upper band, lower bands or full band of UWB [5-7]. Ultra wide-band (UWB) has various applications to be research; one of them is in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) application [13,14]. According to Federal Communication Commission (FCC) 2002, Ultra Wide-band covers a full bandwidth from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz. The bandwidth is more than 20% of the center frequency or more than 500MHz and the average power spectral density should not be over -41.3dBm/MHz [2]. In general, UWB have two main characteristics that increase the demand on its medical applications, firstly, the nature of UWB as an electromagnetic wave with good penetration, secondly low hazard due to its low power. Specially, for health monitoring systems, biotelemetry, hyperthermia, and breast cancer detection implanted devices are widely used. The implantable antenna should be small in size for easily implantation in human body in order to operate and provide better performances [8, 9]. In this paper, a compact microstrip antenna is used to fulfill the requirements of medical applications. The performance of proposed antenna is measured in free space environment (air) and lossy medium. In order to evaluate antenna performances in lossy medium the proposed antenna is submerge in to soybean oil. Soybean oil is chosen as the human fat tissues due to their similar dielectric properties to the human tissues. Proposed antenna is applicable for health monitoring, blood pressure measurement, breast cancer detection and etc. This proposed antenna is very compact in compared to others antenna found in early research literature [9-11] is very compact in size, simple structure and easy to fabricate. The antenna is designed by using HFSS software and VNA (Rohde and schwarz) [12] is used to measure return loss of proposed antenna. II. ANTENNA DESCRIPTION Figure 1(a) and (b) shows the specific schematic configuration of the proposed microstrip antenna for WBAN applications. Antenna has hexagonal shaped radiator with slot in radiating element and feed line. (a) Implantable Compact Patch Antenna for Wireless Body Area Network Applications Reena Sharma, Dr. Kirti Vyas, Dr. R.P Yadav