Smart- textile strain sensor for human joint monitoring

Abstract

With the revolutionary advancement of wearable electronics for human motion monitoring, it has become a keen interest for researchers to turn traditional textiles into precise strain sensors with high accuracy levels and broad-spectrum sensitivity. Therefore, it is considered an active measurement that avoids the misuse of a sensing system. Since these platforms become more ubiquitous, they began to enter the industrial scales such as the fitness and health sector. To do so, stability, user-friendly, cost-effective, and minimum step fabrication processes are imperative in practice. Targeting those goals, a highly efficient textile strain sensor from a crochet knitted elastic (CKE) band was prepared and integrated into a wearable human motion monitoring device systematically. A low-cost customized conductive graphite-polyurethane nanocomposite (G-PU) paste has been developed and applied to the modify CKE band through a dip-coating technique. Finally, an appropriate shape was designed for the estimation of movement and angle measurement of finger, wrist, and elbow belonging a gentle gauge factor (GF=26.8) with high mechanical stability (1000 cycles). The strain sensor was capable to distinguish finger, wrist, and elbow joint angle following the change of resistance dynamically, enabling such potential to be integrated further into a human-machine interface for real-time monitoring.