Weavable and stretchable piezoresistive carbon nanotubes-embedded nanofiber sensing yarns for highly sensitive and multimodal wearable textile sensor

Abstract

Developing multimodal wearable textile sensors to simulate the complex human skin characteristics is central for healthcare, electronic skins, artificial intelligence and biomedical electronic applications. In this paper, stretchable piezoresistive carbon nanotubes-embedded nanofiber sensing yarns are successfully produced and mechanically robust enough to be woven to a wearable textile sensor that can detect and differentiate the multiple mechanical stimuli of pressure, stretching and bending. The smart nanofiber sensing yarn is obtained by wrapping piezoresistive elastic nanofibers onto a stretchable fiber-shaped core electrode with a facile electrospinning technique. The delicate hierarchical structure of this textile sensor ranges from the 1D macroscopic yarns to the submicron elastic nanofibers and internal nanoscale CNT percolation networks. This type of sensor offers a relatively larger contact area, multiple contact sites and larger deformation space for multimodal sensing various mechanical stimuli with improved sensitivity and broad sensing range. The textile-based sensor can be conformally attached to complex surfaces or integrated into a textile, demonstrating an excellent capability of continuous transient detection and differentiation of dynamic human movements. Moreover, a textile sensing platform is successfully integrated for spatially mapping the pressure and strain distribution, which makes it a promising candidate for electronic textiles and wearable devices.