Fully printed and multifunctional graphene-based wearable e-textiles for personalized healthcare applications

Wearable e-textiles have gained huge tractions due to their potential for non-invasive health monitoring. However, manufacturing of multifunctional wearable e-textiles remains challenging, due to poor performance, comfortability, scalability, and cost. Here, we report a fully printed, highly conductive, flexible, and machine-washable e-textiles platform that stores energy and monitor physiological conditions including bio-signals. The approach includes highly scalable printing of graphene-based inks on a rough and flexible textile substrate, followed by a fine encapsulation to produce highly conductive machine-washable e-textiles platform. The produced e-textiles are extremely flexible, conformal, and can detect activities of various body parts. The printed in-plane supercapacitor provides an aerial capacitance of similar to 3.2 mFcm(-2) (stability similar to 10,000 cycles). We demonstrate such e-textiles to record brain activity (an electroencephalogram, EEG) and find comparable to conventional rigid electrodes. This could potentially lead to a multifunctional garment of graphene-based e-textiles that can act as flexible and wearable sensors powered by the energy stored in graphene-based textile supercapacitors.

Automated summary

Wearable e-textiles have the potential for non-invasive health monitoring, but manufacturing multifunctional e-textiles remains challenging. This study presents a fully printed, highly conductive, flexible, and machine-washable e-textiles platform that can store energy and monitor physiological conditions.