Woven Wearable Electronic Textiles as Self-Powered Intelligent Tribo-Sensors for Activity Monitoring

Wearable and shape-adaptive electronic textiles (E-textiles) for human activities detection such as diversity joints motion are highly desired. However, conventional E-textiles still remain great challenges, such as flexibility, air permeability, and large-area fabrication. Here, a fabric E-textile is developed as a self-powered textile for tracking active motion signals. The fiber-shaped coaxial tribo-sensor is fabricated with silver yarn (Ag) and polytetrafluoroethylene yarn, which allows for integrating well with cloths at large scales due to its satisfactory breathability, good washability, and desirable flexibility. Based on the coaxial-structured design, the fabricated E-textile is optimized to generate the output performance with maximum short-current (I-sc) of 90 nA and open-voltage (V-oc) of 8 V. Moreover, the E-textile can also be utilized as a self-powered activity tribo-sensor to monitor the motion signals of the human body. More significantly, the obtained E-textile performs outstanding finger-touching sensitivity, which can be applied in a wireless controller, active sensor, and human-machine interactions. This work presents a new way for a multifunctional E-textile with potential applications in smart home systems, wearable electronics, and personalized healthcare.