Nonwoven fabric active electrodes for biopotential measurement during normal daily activity

Body movement is responsible for most of the interference during physiological data acquisition during normal daily activities. In this paper, we introduce nonwoven fabric active electrodes that provide the comfort required for clothing while robustly recording physiological data in the presence of body movement. The nonwoven fabric active electrodes were designed and fabricated using both hand- and screen-printing thick-film techniques. Nonstretchable nonwoven (Evolon 100) was chosen as the flexible fabric substrate and a silver filled polymer ink (Creative Materials CMI 112-15) was used to form a transducer layer and conductive lines on the nonwoven fabrics. These nonwoven fabric active electrodes can be easily integrated into clothing for wearable health monitoring applications. Test results indicate that nonwoven textile-based sensors show considerable promise for physiological data acquisition in wearable healthcare monitoring applications.