Researchers design self-protective, reproducible electronic textile for high performance wearable devices

BEIJING - Chinese researchers have reported a new type of self-protective and reproducible electronic textile for wearable devices with high performance.

Wearable flexible electronics have been widely used in real-time human motion and health monitoring, human-computer interactions and deep learning, while their sensitivity, response speed and monitoring range need to be improved.

The textile-based electronic devices are still vulnerable to sweat, oil, wear and tear, and even severe washing cycles. Thus the realization of functional electronic textiles with high performance, environment stability and mechanical robustness still remains a challenge, according to a research article recently published in Journal of Materials Chemistry A.

The research group from the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) designed an electronic textile that can protect itself from the interference of a variety of liquids and reproduce after mechanical wear and tear.

The electronic textile could be effectively utilized to monitor human motions, realize human-machine interactions and robot-learning even exposed to sweat or water environment, as introduced by Chen Tao, professor at the NIMTE.

The researchers put the electronic textile onto a robot finger and made the rigid and heavy robot hold fragile objects such as eggs without breaking them, with the aid of a rationally-designed robot-training system.

The flexible sensors with the new electronic textile showed great potential in continuous, long-term and reliable human behavior monitoring.