Distributed Sensing Along Fibres for Smart Clothing
Brett C. Hannigan Tyler J. Cuthbert Chakaveh Ahmadizadeh Carlo Menon
Textile sensors transform our everyday clothing into a means to track
movement and bio-signals in a completely unobtrusive way. One major hindrance
to the adoption of "smart" clothing is the difficulty encountered with
connections and space when scaling up the number of sensors. There is a lack of
research addressing a key limitation in wearable electronics: connections
between rigid and textile elements are often unreliable and they require
interfacing sensors in a way incompatible with textile mass production methods.
We introduce a prototype garment, compact readout circuit, and algorithm to
measure localized strain along multiple regions of a fibre. We employ a helical
auxetic yarn sensor with tunable sensitivity along its length to selectively
respond to strain signals. We demonstrate distributed sensing in clothing,
monitoring arm joint angles from a single continuous fibre. Compared to optical
motion capture, we achieve around 5{\deg} error in reconstructing shoulder,
elbow, and wrist joint angles.