ABSTRACT
Antenna design for wearable technologies is a challenging task mainly due to the unpredictable effects of the human body on the antenna. Once the wearable antenna is located on the human body, the interaction will be dependent on where the antenna is located and on the composition of the body of that particular human being. This implies that the near field of the antenna will be exposed to a different medium for every different scenario. Hence, the antenna should be designed to be insensitive to the near-field effects of the body in order to minimize detuning and keep its efficiency high. Moreover, the channel between a wearable antenna and another off-body, on-body or in-body antenna has a highly dynamic nature. The links that will be formed between each of these categories of devices have almost contradictory requirements. The solution to this can be to form reconfigurable gain patterns that will satisfy these requirements and cope with the dynamic channel conditions.
This chapter will give a review of existing reconfigurable wearable antenna designs and propose further novel solutions.
