Smart Fabric and E-Textile Sensor Technology for Wearables to Measure High Pressure

Smart fabric and electronic textile (e-textile)-based wearable pressure sensors have gained increasing interest in various applications. Fabric sensors for high-pressure measurement have not been well explored. This article presents the design and fabrication of a smart fabric pressure sensor (SFPS) and validates its general characteristics under high pressure. The designed sensor was composed of various material layers, with an active sensing layer made of semiconductive polymer composites (SCPCs). The SCPC layer's width was modified in an iterative design process to improve the range, sensitivity, and linearity of the SFPS. A biasing circuit and a microcontroller-based data acquisition (DAQ) system were utilized to integrate the SFPS and read the sensor's response. An experimental setup was built to repeatedly apply pressure to the SFPS from 4.63 to 300 kPa. Results show that within the specifications, on average, the proposed SFPS can linearly (r = -0.99) measure pressure from 4.63 to 74.08 kPa with a sensitivity of 0.0296 VkPa(-1), and it has an accuracy of 97.72% and repeatability in terms of the standard error of the mean (SEM) of 0.25 kPa. These results encourage us to pursue further research on smart fabric and e-textile-based wearable technologies that measure high pressure.