Woven Wearable Electronic Textiles as Self-Powered Intelligent Tribo-Sensors for Activity Monitoring

Area of Science:

• Materials Science
• Wearable Technology
• Textile Engineering

Background:

• Conventional electronic textiles (E-textiles) face challenges in flexibility, air permeability, and large-area fabrication for human activity detection.
• There is a high demand for wearable, shape-adaptive E-textiles capable of tracking diverse joint motions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel, self-powered fabric E-textile for tracking active motion signals.
• To address limitations of conventional E-textiles regarding flexibility, breathability, and scalability.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of a fiber-shaped coaxial tribo-sensor using silver yarn and polytetrafluoroethylene yarn.
• Integration of the sensor into a fabric E-textile for large-scale application.
• Optimization of the coaxial structure for enhanced output performance.

Main Results:

• The developed E-textile exhibits satisfactory breathability, washability, and flexibility.
• Optimized performance yielded a maximum short-circuit current (Isc) of 90 nA and open-circuit voltage (Voc) of 8 V.
• The E-textile demonstrated outstanding finger-touching sensitivity.

Conclusions:

• A multifunctional, self-powered E-textile was successfully developed, overcoming conventional fabrication challenges.
• The E-textile can serve as an activity tribo-sensor for monitoring human motion and touch.
• Potential applications include wireless controllers, active sensors, human-machine interactions, smart home systems, wearable electronics, and personalized healthcare.