Reliability of Conductive Textile Sensors Exposed to Ageing and Prolonged Use

The electrical and mechanical properties of textile sensors are highly dependent on their environment, enabling unobtrusive sensing applications. However, prolonged usage and ageing effects further affect these applications, especially when flexibility and washability are required. These effects reduce the accuracy and reliability of textile sensors and decreases their usable lifetime. Since there are neither suitable physical models nor existing datasets of aged textiles for newly developed textile sensors, accelerated ageing tests are required to generate enough information for the modelling and training process. This paper uses various types of accelerated aged conductive textiles and analyses their behaviour. Models of wear and ageing can be used to improve the accuracy of sensor systems, assess their reliability, and better understand the ageing process of textile sensors. This allows to increase the usable lifetime of textile sensor systems and give an estimate of reliability of textile based sensor readings for security critical applications.