Passive and Wireless All-Textile Wearable Sensor System.

Abstract

Mobile health technology and activity tracking with wearable sensors enable continuous unobtrusive monitoring of movement and biophysical parameters. Advancements in clothing-based wearable devices have employed textiles as transmission lines, communication hubs, and various sensing modalities; this area of research is moving towards complete integration of circuitry into textile components. A current limitation for motion tracking is the need forcommunication protocols demanding physical connection of textile with rigid devices,or vector network analyzers (VNA) with limited portability and lower sampling rates. Inductor-capacitor (LC) circuits are ideal candidates as textile sensors can be easily implemented with textile components and allow wireless communication. In this paper,the authors report a smart garment that can sense movement and wirelessly transmit data in real time. The garment features a passive LC sensor circuit constructed of electrified textile elements that sense strain and communicate through inductive coupling.Aportable, lightweight reader (fReader) is developed for achieving a faster sampling rate than a downsized VNA to track body movement, and for wirelessly reading sensor information suitable for deployment with a smartphone. The smart garment-fReader system monitors human movement in real-time and exemplifies the potential of textile-based electronics moving forward.