NSF Award
2425141
One of the most significant technological advances in the past decade is the proliferation of wearable sensors capable of tracking a wide range of physiological parameters such as heartbeat, respiration rate, blood pressure, and movement patterns. Integrating these sophisticated sensors with smartphones, smartwatches, and wireless earphones has led to exciting applications in fitness tracking, remote patient monitoring, gaming, and entertainment. Coupled with recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), these wearable sensors enable users to monitor personal health in real time and make data-driven lifestyle choices. However, the advancement of wearable sensors has encountered significant challenges: current wearable sensor antennas tend to operate in isolation, with each antenna needing to separately meet requirements for size, weight, power, frequency bandwidth, and more. This project aims to design and integrate multiple low-profile, power-efficient wearable antennas to form a distributed and adaptive on-body antenna array. This array will be embedded into clothing using the latest electronic textile technology, facilitating efficient and secure wireless communications for continuous, remote health monitoring. The project outcome is expected to have a significant impact on personal health monitoring. In addition, the project contributes to the STEM workforce development by training undergraduate and graduate students in antenna and antenna array designs.<br/><br/>This research will advance knowledge in applied electromagnetics and wireless systems through the development of a novel wearable distributed metasurface antenna array. The research tasks include: development of a novel wearable metasurface transmission line to significantly reduce on-body path loss and enable energy-efficient and secure communication between on-body antennas; investigation of a coordinated wearable antenna array with dual frequency bands and reconfigurable operating modes to enhance transmission gain and mitigate undesirable attacks such as eavesdropping and jamming; exploration of a dual use of wearable antenna array for both wireless communication and sensing, offering a unique way of tracking human body movement patterns using machine learning and AI; and development of an e-textile design of both metasurface transmission line and antenna which can be integrated into clothes and withstand durability tests such as washing, pilling, and abrasion. The project will advance knowledge of on-body electromagnetic wave propagation, dynamic distributed antenna array theory and design, and wireless security through dynamic electromagnetic systems.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
