A Wearable Sensor Based on Gold Nanowires/Textile and Its Integrated Smart Glove for Motion Monitoring and Gesture Expression

Nowadays, flexible piezoresistive sensors have drawn considerable attention in e-skin, motion monitoring devices, etc. Wearability is an important nature of various flexible sensors. Herein, a sensitive flexible piezoresistive pressure sensor with gold nanowires (AuNWs) combined textile with high sensitivity and durability is presented. The knitted cotton fabric is used as the matrix for loading conductive material AuNWs to fabricate the wearable pressure sensors as clothing components. Cotton fabric can be easily transformed into conductive textile due to impregnation and combination with AuNWs. This AuNWs/textile material is demonstrated to be an appropriate flexible sensor to monitor various human motions, such as finger pressing, joints bending, and foot status. A smart glove is integrated with this AuNWs/textile as the sensing block for gesture expression and recognition, signal reading, and transmission. Besides the common gesture with finger movement combination, e.g., numbers, the simple AuNWs/textile-based smart glove can also serve for expressing some emoji symbol and be considered as a human-machine interface for some gesture emoji used in internet social platform. This AuNWs/textile is expected to be used as a practical wearable sensor with great potential for extensive applications, including human-machine interface, healthcare monitoring, and the Internet of Things construction.

Automated summary

The article introduces a sensitive flexible piezoresistive pressure sensor with gold nanowires combined with textile, showing high sensitivity and durability in monitoring various human motions and recognizing gestures.