Development of Textile-based Pressure Sensor and Its Application

Abstract

Smart textile industries have been rapidly developed and are being studied for home care system. Particularly, the healthcare field has been highlighted in the smart device industries due to an increasingly ageing society, and pressure sensors can be utilized in various elderly healthcare products such as flooring and mattress because they can obtain a variety of pressure information in a large-area at indoor without infringing privacy. In this study, the novel type of conductive textile was fabricated using vapor phase polymerization (VPP) of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) to apply a textile to the pressure sensing device. The morphology of the PEDOT-coated conductive textile was observed through the field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM). Moreover, the resistance was confirmed to be adjustable to various resistance ranges depending on the concentration of the oxidant solution and polymerization conditions and measured using 4-probe system. The 3-layered 81-points textile-based pressure sensor was fabricated using the PEDOT-coated conductive textile prepared herein. The visualized system by Matlab was developed to evaluate the sensitivity, multi-pressure recognition, and position tracking. In addition, the developed system can record the data so as to track the moving pressure and detect the event considered to be an emergency. Finally, we confirmed the possibility that PEDOT-coated conductive textiles could be utilized by pressure sensors.