3D Printable Sensors for Smart Textiles

Wearables are a fast evolving field and consists among other things of electronic parts as well as smart textiles such as conductive or light emitting yarns.The common approach of creating a smart textile sensor is using a piece of conductive or piezo resistive fabric and sew or iron it onto an existing garment, or process the fabric during manufacturing. In this work we develop a novel process that uses a commercially available 3D printer with an electrical conductive and flexible plastic, to print the sensor directly onto the textile and eliminate the sewing process or the use of prefabricated clothing.This paper covers not only the tweaking and printing process of the sensor, but also the test definition and execution to evaluate and characterise the sensor. The novelty of this paper is the imparting of the sensors behaviour, and the way how the properties are measured. The further planned application of this sensor is, e.g., the measurement of the breath rate without an extra pulse belt.