Drift Compensation of Wearable Textile Sensors in Mobile Applications

The use-dependent change in physical and electrical properties represents the greatest challenge for the long-term use of conductive textiles as sensors. For sustainable use of these smart textiles, manufacturing methods and protective mechanisms are being developed to delay these influences as far as possible and to reduce their impact. However, the use of such textiles in human environments, places even higher demands on the developed systems due to the requirements for flexibility, elasticity and washability. In addition to mechanical and chemical protection of the textiles, the software-based compensation of aging effects is a key factor for prolonged use.

In this paper, techniques for the detection and compensation of ageing and degradation effects of conductive textile sensors are presented. Suitable methods for the use of smart textiles are evaluated with respect to their feasibility in mobile scenarios on resource limited embedded systems. Accelerated ageing tests and cyclic stress tests of conductive textiles demonstrate, how integrated measurement circuits can be used to detect ageing and wear effects and how resource limited microcontrollers can be used for compensation. Mobile compensation of wear effects in the domain of conductive textile sensors represents the major novelty of this work.