Abstract
Biosignals often have to be detected in sports or for medical reasons. Typical biosignals are pulse and ECG (electrocardiogram), breathing, blood pressure, skin temperature, oxygen saturation, bioimpedance, etc. Typically, scientists attempt to measure these biosignals noninvasively, i.e., with electrodes or other sensors, detecting electric signals, measuring optical or chemical information. While short-time measurements or monitoring of patients in a hospital can be performed by systems based on common rigid electrodes, usually containing a large amount of wiring, long-term measurements on mobile patients or athletes necessitate other equipment. Here, textile-based sensors and textile-integrated data connections are preferred to avoid skin irritations and other unnecessary limitations of the monitored person. In this review, we give an overview of recent progress in textile-based electrodes for electrical measurements and new developments in textile-based chemical and other sensors for detection and monitoring of biosignals.
Highlights
Transforming textiles from objects protecting people from temperature, rain, etc., into functional textiles with additional properties belongs to the emerging trends of our time. These so-called smart textiles often contain electronics, integrated by different degrees, to create special designs; to couple jackets to smartphones; to enable tracking of firefighters or automatic emergency calls for avalanche victims; or to allow for the detection of biosignals, especially of athletes, the elderly and ill people who should be monitored for longer durations [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The additional possibility to embed all necessary cables into the textiles, too, makes a long-term ECG based on textile electrodes and textile-integrated electronics much more comfortable than the still common version with rigid equipment, several cables and glued electrodes [10,11,12]
Berglund et al investigated the effect of washing on textile stretching and bending sensors which were tested as pure textile sensors or insulated by a fusible polymer film [58]. They found a drift of the pure sensor upon washing and especially by tumble drying, and delamination of the insulated films from the sensors, showing that not each insulation approach will work without problems. While these studies were based on the elongation-dependent piezoresistive properties of textile fabrics, breathing measurements can be performed by capacitive textile sensors [59,60], magnetic induction sensors [61] or fiber-optical sensors embedded in textile fabrics [62], as already mentioned for ECG measurements
Summary
Transforming textiles from objects protecting people from temperature, rain, etc., into functional textiles with additional properties belongs to the emerging trends of our time. The electrodes were prepared from silver-coated yarns, stitched onto an inextensible fabric and investigated by gluing them with tape on the chest of 8 probands They found no significant differences between these textile electrodes and commercial gel-electrodes, regarding the detectability of the R-peak. Lee and Cho combined single-walled CNTs with silver nanowires on a polyurethane nanoweb to produce ECG electrodes [22] They found these electrodes to deliver suitable ECG signals on diverse probands, independent from their state of movement, body properties, etc., which they correlated with a low resistance of these conductive nanofabrics. Another point of differentiation is the number of leads applied in such textile-based systems. Textile ECG sensors are still a large and important research area, in spite of the steadily reported small progress
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