Skin‐Mount Textile‐Based Flexible Strain Sensors for Physiotherapy

Abstract

Tremendous development in intelligent wearable gadgets opens up opportunities for manufacturing flexible wearable strain sensors. Comfortable and safe flexible strain sensors have high demand in wearable applications and therefore, the textile‐based flexible strain sensors are getting popular. To achieve attributes like easy fabrication, cost‐effectiveness, high sensitivity, good stability, and portability is still a challenge to overcome. In this regard, we present textile‐based flexible strain sensors, one on jeans fabric and the other on cotton fabric. A conventional interdigitated electrode structure is adopted, and sensors are prepared by a facile and economical fabrication process. Both sensors own high sensitivity factors i.e., GF > 200 and stability of ∽ 10,000 cycles. The anticipated works show a linear response R2 = 0.99, low hysteresis < 5% and minimum resolution < 7o. The intended sensors are implemented for a real time application i.e. the physiotherapy of the knee and the neck. The jeans fabric based sensor was used for knee therapy, and the cotton for the neck. The daily therapy sessions were recorded and examined. The sensors respond well to the applied strain during therapy sessions, proving to be an outstanding choice for integration into bio‐medical wearable devices for therapeutic purposes. The proposed sensors can also be auspicious candidates for targeting many other wearable applications.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.