Textile electrodes of jacquard woven fabrics for biosignal measurement

In the last few years, textile electrodes have become an interesting topic for physiological monitoring, steadily developing to be applied in innovative wearable sensing systems. The structure of textile electrodes can be fabricated by weaving, knitting, or embroidering conductive yarn and is now commercially available. The upgraded textile electrode is used in biosignal sensing and was designed in the form of a jacquard woven structure to measure the ECG. In the case of knit fabric, which has piezo-resistive properties, the textile electrodes were developed by using the fabric's flexible strain gauges in a bio-monitoring system. However, the piezo-resistive sensing fabrics have some shortcomings such as low dynamic range, poor repeatability, and performance deterioration after washing or repeated folding. Woven fabric, which is cloth woven in the warp and weft directions, has less strain properties and can be constructed more uniformly than knit fabric. Therefore, due to their more consistent woven structure, jacquard woven fabrics made with conductive yarn can be manufactured evenly on a large scale and consistently maintain their properties. The woven structure of jacquard electrodes consists of a double-faced weave and is woven with a silver covering yarn in the weft direction. The proposed textile electrodes were composed of two groups made up of warps with either the unremoved 100% warps or the half-removed 50% warps of jacquard woven electrodes that were convex or flat and were either with or without conductive paste. The ECG measurements for the textile electrodes were repeated three times in resting conditions. The convex jacquard electrodes of the half-removed 50% warps with the conductive paste resulted in the most significant SNR improvement (33.67 dB). The purpose of this paper was to investigate a method to design jacquard woven electrodes uniformly on a large scale and to apply it feasibly to ECG measurement.