6th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EUCAP)

Body Effects on the GPS Antenna of a Wearable Tracking Device

Xi Lin Chen and Niels Kuster
ITIS Foundation Zeughausstrasse 43 8004 Zurich, Switzerland Email: vick@itis.ethz.ch kuster@itis.ethz.ch

Yu Chee Tan
Green Antenna Pte. Ltd. 29 Mandai Estate 07-11, Singapore 729932 Email: ga@green-antenna.com

Nicolas Chavannes
Schmid and Partner Engineering AG Zeughausstrasse 43 8004 Zurich, Switzerland Email: chavanne@speag.com

AbstractIn this study, the performance of a GPS antenna (inverted-F) design is investigated when the tracking device is placed on at torso and dog-shaped phantoms. A prototype of the device is constructed to validate the proposed antenna design in free space condition with both measurement and simulation. Following that, the effects of body loading to the antenna are examined through numerical simulations to achieve an optimum orientation of the device with respect to the actual operating condition (with body loading). The results from this study indicate that the radiation/reception characteristics of a small GPS antenna can be very different between free space and body loading conditions. In order to achieve the best antenna performance, the body loading effect should be closely examined.

multiple GPS signals to be used for the triangulation of object location. Hence, the receiving GPS antenna plays a crucial role to ensure the functionality of the device. Furthermore, the tracking device needs to be attached on a mobile object which inevitably poses impact on the reception capability of a GPS antenna. In this study, a small GPS tracking device with a build-in inverted-F antenna is investigated. By examining the body effects on the GPS antenna due to various phantom loading conditions, an optimum device-body-mounting conguration is achieved. II. D EVICE C ONFIGURATION The GPS tracking device under investigation has a dimension of 37 mm 75 mm 16 mm (excluding buckle and belt). As shown in Figure 2, the device consists of a printed circuit board, a battery and an inverted-F antenna which serves as a GPS antenna [2-3]. The generic device housing is colored in red and green in order to distinguish the orientation of the device with respect to a user body. The actual device housing should be designed based on the mounting conguration that provides better reception of GPS signals.

I. I NTRODUCTION The popularity of wearable GPS tracking and monitoring device [1] has been on the rise following the booming of GPS navigation applications. As shown in Figure 1, such wearable tracking device can be attached to a mobile object and serves as a GPS receiver while transmitting information regarding device location either on-demand or periodically. The GPS antenna embedded within such a device is expected to operate when placed in close proximity to a human or animal body. The transmission of location signal can be accomplished in various ways, e.g., through the popular GSM network in the form of SMS text message or GPRS data package. The operation of a GPS tracking device relies on the reception of

Fig. 1. The operation of a wearable GPS tracking device on a domestic pet.

Fig. 2. (a) CAD model of the device and antenna without housing, (b) device generic housing and (c) actual antenna prototype without housing.

978-1-4577-0919-7/12/$26.00 2011 IEEE

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Fig. 3. Measured and simulated free space S11 of the proposed GPS antenna

III. A NTENNA P ERFORMANCE IN F REE S PACE The free space performance of the proposed antenna is measured in an anechoic chamber (with a sleeve balun for 1575 MHz) and simulated using a FDTD-based numerical solver [4]. As shown in Figure 3, the antenna is tuned to resonate at 1575 MHz, it is observed that the measurement result exhibits a larger bandwidth than the simulated result, this is due to the difference in metal and dielectric loss between simulation and measurement and the imperfect choking of coaxial cable. The measured total efciency at 1575 MHz is found to be 53.7% while the simulated total efciency is 60.8% and the simulated upper hemisphere radiated efciency is 39.3% (with the red cover side facing the sky) . The free space 3D gain pattern is shown in Figure 4, the peak gain is found to be 1.69 dBi. It is observed that the antenna pattern exhibits a main lobe in the negative z direction (on the red cover side). One might assume that based on the free space antenna pattern, the device should be placed with the green cover facing the user body since there is a null in the radiation pattern towards the positive z direction.

Fig. 5. Simulated (left) and measured (right) free space 2D far eld (total electric eld) polar plots at 1575 MHz, (a) XZ plane, (b) YZ plane and (c) XY plane.

Such assumption will be proven wrong in the next section. In Figure 5, the simulated and measured 2D far eld pattern (total electric eld) plots are presented. It is observed that a fairly good agreement is achieved between the simulated and the measured far eld patterns. Note that due to the differences in axis assignment, there is either a 90 degree or a 180 degree rotation for the measurement results when compared to the simulated ones. Based on simulation and measurement results, the free space far eld characteristics of the proposed GPS antenna is acquired. IV. B ODY E FFECTS A NALYSIS T HROUGH N UMERICAL S IMULATIONS To analyze the effects of body loading to the proposed GPS antenna, the tracking device is simulated with a at torso phantom and a dog phantom. A keep out distance of 8 mm between the phantom body and the device is applied to account for the space occupied by belt and buckle. The dielectric

Fig. 4. Simulated free space 3D gain of the GPS antenna at 1575 MHz, normalized to 1.69 dBi peak gain.

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Fig. 6.

Simulated antenna S11 under various phantom loading conditions.

property of the phantom follows the muscle tissue of the human body and is given as 53.8 for the relative permmittivity and 1.22 S/m for the conductivity [5] at 1575 MHz. The dimension of the at phantom block is 400 mm 400 mm 100 mm while the dimension of the dog phantom [6] is 910 mm 260 mm 700 mm (length width height). It should be noted that the body loading environment simulated in this study does not account for the heterogeneity of a user body, i.e., a simplied loading environment is approximated. Two device orientations are investigated, scenario A is with the green cover side facing the sky while scenario B is with the red cover side facing the sky (the main lobe direction for the free space condition). The antenna S11 resulted from different phantom types and device orientations are plotted in Figure 6. As shown, the presence of a body phantom causes a shift in the antenna resonance frequency. It is observed that the at torso phantom and the dog phantom result in similar antenna

Fig. 8. Simulated 3D gain of the GPS antenna at 1575 MHz for at phantom scenario B, normalized to 0.45 dBi peak gain.

input impedances. Based on the S11 plots, the difference in the antenna mismatch at 1575MHz is not signicant among the investigated body loading conditions. As shown in Figure 7 and 8, the far eld gain patterns for the at torso phantom appear to be fairly similar. However, the antenna peak gain is much higher in scenario A than in scenario B. This suggests that the device orientation in scenario B, which is optimum in free space, is no longer the preferred conguration under body loading condition. The 3D gain patterns for the dog phantom are presented in Figure 9 and 10. A similarity is observed between the at torso case and the dog phantom case: the device orientation scenario A provides higher antenna gain than scenario B. The simulation results of various antenna performance parameters

Fig. 7. Simulated 3D gain of the GPS antenna at 1575 MHz for at phantom scenario A, normalized to 1.16 dBi peak gain.

Fig. 9. Simulated 3D gain of the GPS antenna at 1575 MHz for dog phantom scenario A, normalized to 3.01 dBi peak gain.

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Fig. 10. Simulated 3D gain of the GPS antenna at 1575 MHz for dog phantom scenario B, normalized to 1.08 dBi peak gain.

(gain, total efciency, upper hemisphere radiated efciency and partial GPS radiated efciency [7]) due to body loading effects are shown in Table 1. The summarized results conrm that the GPS antenna exhibits better performance in scenario A than in scenario B, for both at torso and dog phantom loading conditions. This implies that the device orientation for the best GPS antenna performance in body loading condition cannot be assumed based on the free space radiation pattern. As shown in Figure 7 to 10, the antenna radiation pattern is more directive for the dog phantom loading than the at torso loading. The differences in the respective 2D radiation patterns can be observed in Figure 11. It is noted that for the estimation of total efciency, a at torso can be used as a generic loading scenario. On the other hand, the antenna gain pattern and peak gain value are highly correlated to the actual shape of the phantom body.
TABLE I S IMULATED G AIN , TOTAL EFFICIENCY (TE), UPPER HEMISPHERE RADIATED EFFICIENCY (UHRE) AND PARTIAL GPS RADIATED EFFICIENCY (PGRE) VALUES AT 1575 MH Z Gain (dBi) 1.69 1.16 0.45 3.01 1.08 TE(%) 60.8 18.7 14.3 20.5 14.5 UHRE (%) 39.3 18.3 13.4 18.8 12.5 PGRE (%) 48.8 18.6 14.1 19.9 13.9

Fig. 11. Simulated 2D gain of the GPS antenna at 1575 MHz for (a) at torso scenario A and (b) dog phantom scenario A.

plane, the body loading effects must be investigated in addition to its free space radiation performance to ensure an optimum GPS signal reception. R EFERENCES
[1] S. Manoharan, On GPS Tracking of Mobile Devices, Networking and Services, 2009 Fifth International Conference on, pp. 415-418, 2009. [2] M. Z. Azad and M. Ali, A Miniature Implanted Inverted-F Antenna for GPS Application, Antennas and Propagation, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 57, pp. 1854 -1858, 2009. [3] M. U. Rehman, Y. Gao, X. Chen, C. G. Parini and Z. Ying, Effects of Human Body Interference on the Performance of a GPS Antenna, Antennas and Propagation, 2007. EuCAP 2007. The Second European Conference on, 2007. [4] SEMCAD X: Full Wave Electromagnetic/Thermal Simulation Platform. http://www.semcad.com. [5] S. Gabriel, R. W. Lau and C. Gabriel, The Dielectric Properties of Biological Tissues: Parametric models for the dielectric spectrum of tissues, Phys. Med. Biol., vol. 41, no.11, 1996, pp.2271-2293. [6] Poser: Complete 3D Figure Design & Animation. http://poser.smithmicro.com. [7] CTIA Test Plan for Mobile Station Over the Air Performance, Revision 3.1, December 2010 (draft).

Free Space Flat Torso A Flar Torso B Dog Back A Dog Back B

V. C ONCLUSION The investigation results show that for a wearable GPS tracking device, the device orientation for the best free space upper hemisphere radiation/reception performance might not correspond to that of the body loading condition, i.e., for a body-worn monopole-type GPS antenna with small ground

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