The quest for a miniaturized antenna in the wireless capsule endoscopy application: a review

This review paper explores the potential use of the planar miniaturized antenna for wireless capsule endoscopy application: one of the promising fields in the current era. The paper highlights the design strategy, various optimization techniques with respect to system realization, material compatibility issues and finally the mandatory EM radiation effect analysis for the said application. It compares amongst various currently reported structures in context with different performance metrics. Inherent challenges of this emerging field of bio-medical engineering have also been detailed here along with futuristic approaches for enhancing the throughput.

Design of a Highly Miniaturized, Inherently Matched, Spherical Folded Dipole Antenna and Evaluation of its Quality Factor

<div>A highly miniaturized three-dimensional spherical folded dipole antenna has been reported, for which inherent impedance matching is achieved with respect to a practical source impedance by employing a simple series-LC loading combination, thereby engineering its input impedance. In order to maximize its bandwidth, the miniaturized antenna employs a spherical helix structure as the folded arm that occupies the full volume of the corresponding Chu sphere. A bifilar (two folded arms) and a quadrifilar (four folded arms) helix loaded folded dipole antenna are designed, and full-wave simulations show that both the resulting antennas demonstrate excellent impedance matching when miniaturized by 85% in comparison to a resonant dipole operating at the same frequency. Despite the high degree of miniaturization, the resulting radiation efficiencies for the bifilar and quadrifilar antennas are found to be 87.1% and 90.6%, respectively. Furthermore, various quality-factor definitions are explored for the quadrifilar antenna, and it is observed that the resulting quality factor is around 1.83 (1.22) times that predicted by the Chu (Thal) lower bound.</div>

Design of a Highly Miniaturized, Inherently Matched, Spherical Folded Dipole Antenna and Evaluation of its Quality Factor

<div>A highly miniaturized three-dimensional spherical folded dipole antenna has been reported, for which inherent impedance matching is achieved with respect to a practical source impedance by employing a simple series-LC loading combination, thereby engineering its input impedance. In order to maximize its bandwidth, the miniaturized antenna employs a bifilar spherical helix that maximizes use of the volume of the corresponding Chu sphere. Full-wave simulations show that the resulting antenna demonstrates excellent impedance matching and over 95% radiation efficiency even when miniaturized by 85% in comparison to a resonant dipole operating at the same frequency. Furthermore, various quality-factor definitions for the miniaturized spherical folded dipole antenna were estimated. It is observed that, owing to the use of proximate but non-overlapping resonances, two of these definitions fall below the Chu lower bound around the frequency of operation, resulting in a fractional bandwidth larger than that predicted by the Chu limit.</div>

Design of a Highly Miniaturized, Inherently Matched, Spherical Folded Dipole Antenna and Evaluation of its Quality Factor

<div>A highly miniaturized three-dimensional spherical folded dipole antenna has been reported, for which inherent impedance matching is achieved with respect to a practical source impedance by employing a simple series-LC loading combination, thereby engineering its input impedance. In order to maximize its bandwidth, the miniaturized antenna employs a bifilar spherical helix that maximizes use of the volume of the corresponding Chu sphere. Full-wave simulations show that the resulting antenna demonstrates excellent impedance matching and over 95% radiation efficiency even when miniaturized by 85% in comparison to a resonant dipole operating at the same frequency. Furthermore, various quality-factor definitions for the miniaturized spherical folded dipole antenna were estimated. It is observed that, owing to the use of proximate but non-overlapping resonances, two of these definitions fall below the Chu lower bound around the frequency of operation, resulting in a fractional bandwidth larger than that predicted by the Chu limit.</div>