A Textile Based Capacitive Pressure and Shear Force Sensor

Measuring the performance of an athlete during sports is currently a high area of interest. Where smart watches present a convenient and practicable way to acquire ones vital parameters, other types of measurements like force measurements need additional equipment. In specific applications, like cross-country skiing, conventional force sensors cannot be used to measure these forces, because the required space would impact the athlete in the performance negatively. The circumstances urge us to have a closer look at other approaches like textile based capacitive sensors for pressure and shear force measurement which utilise conductive silver coated yarns. With them it is possible to create small footprint and flexible sensor systems which are able to detect tensile forces in multiple directions. Therefore a sensor architecture is presented, which fulfills this requirement and present a textile prototype of such a pressure and shear force sensor. This prototype is further characterized and tested with different angles of force and long-term measurements to evaluate any drift in sensor data. The test results confirm the functionality of the sensor architecture, which provides the fundamentals for future applications.