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Highly stretchable fiber-shaped e-textiles for strain/pressure sensing, full-range human motions detection, health monitoring, and 2D force mapping

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Abstract

Textile-based electronics (e-textiles) have attracted huge attention in wearable sensors recently. Even though highly sensitive textile-based pressure sensors and highly stretchable textile-based strain sensors are widely researched and reported in recent years, it is still full of challenges to develop high stretchable textile-based sensors simultaneously and satisfy strain and pressure sensing, which is necessary for full-range detection of human motions. On the other hand, compared to traditional planar e-textiles, fiber-shaped e-textiles have plenty of advantages due to their fibrous architecture with lightweight, portable, skin compliant, and easily weave properties. In this work, a fiber-shaped textile, knitted with hierarchical polyurethane (PU) fibers, is used to fabricate a multifunctional e-textile by coating of silver nanowires (AgNWs) and styrene–butadiene–styrene. Due to the AgNWs conductive networks, the inherent stretchability of PU fibers, and the hierarchical structure, the as-prepared e-textile exhibits high conductivity, high stretchability, high sensitivity, and multi-detection of strain and pressure. What is more, the fabricated multifunctional e-textiles are also successfully weaved into electronic fabric for 2D force mapping. The simple, scalable strategy endows the multifunctional e-textiles great potentials in full-range detection and health care areas.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51573053), the Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangdong Province (Grant No. 2014A010105022), the Special Funds for Applied Science and Technology Research and Development of Guangdong Province (Grant No. 2015B020237004), and the Special Funds for the Cultivation of Guangdong College Students’ Scientific and Technological Innovation (Grant No. pdjh2017b0039).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Materials Science and Engineering, Key Lab of Guangdong Province for High Property and Functional Macromolecular Materials, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510640, People’s Republic of China

    Song Chen, Shuqi Liu, Pingping Wang, Haizhou Liu & Lan Liu

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  1. Song Chen
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  2. Shuqi Liu
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  3. Pingping Wang
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  4. Haizhou Liu
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  5. Lan Liu
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Correspondence to Lan Liu.

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Chen, S., Liu, S., Wang, P. et al. Highly stretchable fiber-shaped e-textiles for strain/pressure sensing, full-range human motions detection, health monitoring, and 2D force mapping. J Mater Sci 53, 2995–3005 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-017-1644-y

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