Miniaturized Grid Array Antenna for Body-centric RFID Communications in 5G S-band

Battery-less wearable and epidermal antennas look to converge with the emerging 5G framework, allowing ultrafast and delay-free monitoring of biophysical parameters. These antennas have been demonstrated to perform in the S-band the same as conventional UHF RFID links but with much larger bandwidths. Wearable grid-arrays show increased performance can be achieved resulting in read distances up to 6m in battery-less mode, while keeping the feeding and fabrication complexity low. Here, the optimal performance of miniaturized on-skin grid-array is investigated with a prototype manufactured and tested on a body phantom. Miniaturization results show a 35% reduction in size is possible with negligible loss of radiation performance.