Dielectric loaded impedance matching for wideband implanted antennas

In implanted biomedical devices, due to the presence of surrounding dissipative biological tissue, the antenna suffers poor impedance matching. This causes degradation in the performance of a wideband or ultra-wideband (UWB) implanted device. Moreover, the electrical properties of tissue change from organ to organ, and possibly from time to time. In this paper, it is shown that loading of antennas with suitable insulators can deliver broadband matching across a range of dissipative medium properties. An impedance-matched UWB antenna designed to operate inside a lossy medium, which has varying electromagnetic properties within the range expected in biological tissues, is presented. The operating bandwidth of the proposed design is 3.5-4.5 GHz, which is an interference-free subset of the unlicensed UWB band in the US. It is demonstrated that once the dielectric loading is applied, the conventional procedure for antenna design in free space can be followed. The proposed implantable small capsule-shaped slot antenna has been characterized using numerical simulations. Details of a proof-of-concept experiment are presented.