Abstract
Recently, there has a growing interest in the development and implementation of body area networks. These systems are intended to operate in a similar fashion to wireless land area networks (WLAN) with exception that they are strictly confined to the human body. This type of technology has risen in demand due to the growing abundance of portable computing devices. However, the human body creates a challenging environment for the design of wearable antennas that can communicate efficiently. As a result, a detailed study of the on body communication channel is required. Lastly, many of these systems are intended to operate over a very wide frequency band. Therefore, the design of ultra wide band antennas (UWB) is a pertinent area of research in this technology.