Comparing liquid homogeneous and multilayer phantoms for human body implantable antennas

Abstract

We compare the performance of a ultrawideband implantable antenna when immersed in a liquid homogeneous phantom and in a multilayer phantom. The goal is to assess how good the simple liquid phantom is to represent the real body over a broad bandwidth. We evaluate not only the frequency-domain parameters – input reflection (s11) and transmission coefficients (s21) – but also the performance of the antenna in the time domain – pulse fidelity and window containing 90% of the pulse energy. The results show a good resemblance between both phantom results, suggesting that liquid homogeneous phantoms may be enough to test the performance of this type of antennas and potentially simplify the measurement setup.