The Design of a Reconfigurable Slot Antenna Printed on Glass for Wearable Applications

A novel pattern and polarization reconfigurable wearable slot antenna suitable for smart glasses is proposed. The antenna is designed and fabricated on glass and reconfiguration is realized using four PIN diodes. It operates in the 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical Band. It consists of an equilateral L-shaped slot fed by a single coplanar waveguide feed. The slot is manipulated with switches to generate two modes of operation. Each mode corresponds to one of the two states of the switches which result in different L-shaped slots with unequal legs creating patterns that are polarized in perpendicular to each other. The antenna has been shown to perform well near the human body using numerical and physical phantoms. The correlation between the two modes is calculated to be less than 0.04 with 41% and 56% on-body efficiency for each mode. The Specific Absorption Rate is shown to be well below the limit specified in the European Standards through simulations.