All-Textile Electronic Skin Enabled by Highly Elastic Spacer Fabric and Conductive Fibers.

Abstract

Electronic fabrics that combine traditional fabric with intelligent functionalities have attracted increasing attention. Here an all-fabric pressure sensor with a wireless battery-free monitoring system was successfully fabricated, where a 3D penetrated fabric sandwiched between two highly conductive fabric electrodes acts as a dielectric layer. Thanks to the good elastic recovery of the spacer fabric, the capacitance pressure sensor exhibits a high sensitivity of 0.283 KPa-1 with a fast response time and good cycling stability (≥20 000). Water-soluble poly(vinyl alcohol) template-assisted silver nanofibers were constructed on the high-roughness fabric surface to achieve high conductivity (0.33 Ω/sq), remarkable mechanical robustness, and good biocompatibility with human skin. In addition, the coplanar fabric sensor arrays were successfully designed and fabricated to spatially map resolved pressure information. More importantly, the gas-permeable fabrics can be stuck on the skin for wireless real-time pressure detection through a fiber inductor coil with a resonant frequency shift sensitivity of 6.8 MHz/kPa. Our all-fabric sensor is more suitable for textile technology compared with traditional pressure sensors and exhibited wide potential applications in the field of intelligent fabric for electronic skin.