Abstract
The development of wearable sensors, in particular fully-textile ones, is one of the most interesting open challenges in bioelectronics. Several and significant steps forward have been taken in the last decade in order to achieve a compact, lightweight, cost-effective, and easy to wear platform for healthcare and sport activities real-time monitoring. We have developed a fully textile, multi-thread biosensing platform that can detect different bioanalytes simultaneously without interference, and, as an example, we propose it for testing chloride ions (Cl−) concentration and pH level. The textile sensors are simple threads, based on natural and synthetic fibers, coated with the conducting polymer poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrene-sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) and properly functionalized with either a nano-composite material or a chemical sensitive dye to obtain Cl− and pH selective sensing functionality, respectively. The single-thread sensors show excellent sensitivity, reproducibility, selectivity, long term stability and the ability to work with small volumes of solution. The performance of the developed textile devices is demonstrated both in buffer solution and in artificial human perspiration to perform on-demand and point-of-care epidermal fluids analysis. The possibility to easily knit or sew the thread sensors into fabrics opens up a new vision for a textile wearable multi-sensing platform achievable in the near future.
Highlights
Wearable sensing technologies are attracting a growing academic and industrial interest thanks to the driving force of market demand and the prospective large impact on real life
In order to check the success of the fabrication procedure previously described, Scanning Electron Microscopy was employed to obtain images of the four yarns coated with the polymeric mixture and after the electrochemical deposition of Ag/AgCl NPs and PEDOT:bromothymol blue (BTB)
No substantial difference was found among the four coated yarns, where the semiconducting polymer PEDOT:PSS mainly covers the outside of the thread with an average thickness of (12 ± 2) μm, as highlighted from the cross-sections in the inset of the left image
Summary
Wearable sensing technologies are attracting a growing academic and industrial interest thanks to the driving force of market demand and the prospective large impact on real life. Wearable chemical sensors are at an early stage of development even if they represent a powerful tool to monitor human physiological parameters in a real-time, non-invasive and accurate manner. A fully textile sensor d evice[34,35,36,37,38,39] embodies the most advanced technological frontier to achieve complete flexibility, portability, non-invasiveness and lightweight towards continuous human body monitoring. Their wide spread use, in addition to a well-established. The possibility to integrate into a fabric an array of multiple textile sensors able to selectively detect different analytes would allow to implement a powerful textile multi-sensor platform, a sort of lab-on-fabric device
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