Easily scalable and highly flexible machine knitted resistive pressure sensor for smart textile applications

Abstract

This study presents textile based resistive pressure sensor that incorporates off-the-shelf PES/stainless steel conductive yarn and nonconductive acrylic yarn. The fabrication process involves integrating the resistive pressure sensors directly into the base fabric during one knitting operation through computerized machine knitting technology with little human involvement. This work also explores opportunities for manufacturing of soft, highly flexible, and easily controllable double-layered out-of-plane sensors in an easily scalable way. A custom resistance measuring circuit was built to characterize the sensors and the resulting equivalent resistance under various loads, i.e., (0 g–900 g). Reproducibility was confirmed by developing and testing several sensors with the same structural characteristics. The results obtained from the experiments showed that the conductive yarn types and the design parameters significantly affect the sensing properties of knitted sensors. It has been found that sensor types 2, 5, and 6 show better stability, repeatability, high response and recovery time, dynamic ranges, and sensitivity when subjected to various loadings, compared to other developed sensors in this work. As a proof of concept, this sensor demonstrates various smart textile applications, including interactive sleeves for wearable user interface, soft controllable switch, and human movement detection.