Textile antennas for body-worn applications have some very specific requirements and needs. From an electrical engineer's point of view, good radiation characteristics and impedance matching to the active electronics are important. From the wearer's perspective, the antenna should be unobtrusively integrated into the clothing, and the smart textile comfortable to wear. New techniques offer the potential to fulfill these different needs. One new approach consists of applying metalized eyelets to implement substrate integrated waveguide technology on textile materials. This results in high-performance on-body antennas with excellent behavior in close proximity of the human body. Two realizations are discussed: a wideband design and a miniaturized half mode substrate integrated waveguide dual-band design. Both yield excellent free-space and on-body performance, and superb antenna-body isolation, automatically resulting in very robust characteristics when deployed on-body.
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