Hello,
We are currently developing a second version of a wearable BLE device and would like some advice about the antenna design. Our device is meant to be worn in the middle of the chest and this gives a lot of challenges for connectivity. We have experienced a lot of connection issues from the human body absorbing a lot of the radio waves and would like advice on how we should design our antenna. For a ballpark estimate we are hoping for around 200Kbps at 20 feet in all directions (especially when the human body is between our device and the phone). Previously we have used a trace antenna but since our board needs to be directly contacting the skin we weren't able to get a good connection with it. We are not sure if we should go with a chip antenna or put a coax port and attach a FPC antenna (we can place it max 15mm away from the skin in our enclosure). We are also looking into adding a nRF21540 which we are hoping will also increase the range. Any advice or feedback on if this is realistic will be much appreciated.
Thank you for your help.
