The requirement of mounting several access points and base stations is increasing tremendously due to recent advancements and the need for high-data-rate communication services of 5G and 6G wireless communication systems. In the near future, the enormous number of these access points might cause a mess. In such cases, an optically transparent antenna (OTA) is the best option for making the environment more appealing and pleasant. OTAs provide the possible solution as these maintain the device aesthetics to achieve transparency as well as fulfill the basic coverage and bandwidth requirements. Various attempts have been made to design OTAs to provide coverage for wireless communication, particularly for the dead zones. These antennas can be installed on building windows, car windscreens, towers, trees, and smart windows, which enables network access for vehicles and people passing by those locations. Several transparent materials and techniques are used for transparent antenna design. Thin-film and mesh-grid techniques are very popular to transform metallic parts of the antenna into a transparent material. In this article, a comprehensive review of both the techniques used for the design of OTAs is presented. The performance comparison of OTAs on the basis of bandwidth, gain, transparency, transmittance, and efficiency is also presented. An OTA is the best choice in these situations to improve the aesthetics and comfort of the surroundings with high antenna performance.

Several research articles are available in the literature regarding the design of antennas, but hardly (to the best of authors’ knowledge) few papers covered the antennas that are designed for the detection, diagnostics, and monitoring of various diseases. There is a need for a research article in which the design and performance of such significant antennas should be compared and highlighted based on various available design techniques to enhance performance parameters that include efficiency, bandwidth, size and appropriate bio-compatible material used to transmit data from the human body efficiently. Antennas are essential in biomedical applications for wireless communication, miniaturization, integration, implantable devices, diagnostic imaging, biotelemetry, and biosensing. They enable efficient and reliable wireless connectivity, facilitating remote monitoring, improving patient care, and advancing medical research. Designing biomedical antennas presents several challenges, including miniaturization and integration into compact devices, ensuring biocompatibility with the human body, conforming to biological structures, mitigating electromagnetic interference (EMI), accounting for signal attenuation and propagation in the body, optimizing power efficiency, and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. Overcoming these challenges requires expertise in antenna design, biocompatibility, electromagnetic modelling, and collaboration between disciplines. Therefore, a detailed review is required so that any scholar who wishes to excel in this field may read this review to understand future directions better and work already done for the design of biomedical antennas. This review comprises a comparison of several significant biomedical antenna design techniques used for the detection, diagnosis and monitoring of various diseases, which can be helpful for the medical community for the detection of various diseases, including skin cancer, breast cancer, lungs cancer, endoscopy, brain tumor and glucose level detection. The various features of biomedical antennas are thoroughly investigated to provide performance metrics of the antennas designed to diagnose various diseases. The advantage of this study is the understanding of different types of antennas for various diseases. This study also allows realizing appropriate bio-compatible materials and flexible materials for biomedical antenna design, the effect of Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) on human/animal body and finally, the tables provide the antenna performance in terms of gain, bandwidth, and directivity with respect to antenna size and type of substrate material used for each disease. These biomedical antennas have several applications for diagnosis, early-stage cancer detection and, in some cases providing enough energy to cure the cancer cells in the human/animal body. Moreover, the implementation of Machine learning algorithms for the early detection of tumor for the above-mentioned diseases is also discussed.

A miniaturized folded dipole patch antenna (FDPA) design for biomedical applications operating at sub 1 GHz (434 MHz) band is presented. Antenna is fabricated on FR-4 substrate material having dimensions of 16.40 mm $$\times$$× 8.60 mm $$\times$$× 1.52 mm (0.023 $$\lambda$$λ $$\times$$× 0.012 $$\lambda$$λ $$\times$$× 0.002 $$\lambda$$λ ). Indirect feed coupling is applied through two parallel strips at bottom layer of the substrate. The antenna size is reduced by 83% through lumped inductor placed at the center path of the radiating FDPA, suitable for biomedical (implantable) applications and hyperthermia. Moreover, Impedance matching is achieved without using any Balun transformer or any other complex matching network. The proposed antenna provides an impedance bandwidth of 6 MHz (431–437 MHz) below − 10 dB and a gain of − 31 dB at 434 MHz. The designed antenna is also placed on a human body model to evaluate its performance for hyperthermia through Specific Absorption Rate (SAR), Effective Field Size (EFS), and penetration depth (PD).

In this paper, a compact 10-element multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system for fifth generation (5G) wireless communication system is presented. The antenna structure has a T-shaped feeding element and a reduced size capacitively coupled meandered loop radiating element. The proposed MIMO antenna system is operating at 3.5 GHz. The MIMO antenna element is self-isolated and it has a compact size of 13.45×6 mm2. It exhibits very good isolation of more than 15 dB without using any external decoupling structure like a neutralization line or slot technique. Furthermore, performance parameters like total efficiency are around 40-64%, envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) is below 0.02, while gain of all antennas is between 3-3.4dBi. The performance of the proposed MIMO antenna is also verified through the measurement of its fabricated prototype. In this paper, a compact 10-element multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system for fifth generation (5G) wireless communication system is presented.

An optically transparent MIMO antenna with close proximity two-element square patch antenna elements has been presented here to achieve forthcoming requirements of compactness, optical transparency and visual aesthetic for 5G wireless communication and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. A simple, thin optically transparent and more innovative decoupling structure with easier to design closely spaced transparent MIMO antenna configuration is proposed, optimized, and analyzed to achieve higher isolation and diversity gain performance even with close proximity of patch antenna elements. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) material, which is thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family is used as a substrate to achieve optical transparency. The wired metal mesh parameters are taken into consideration to achieve required optical transparency as well as isolation and radiation performance for the MIMO antenna. The performance of the proposed MIMO antenna is also verified through fabricated prototype.