Fabrication And Properties Of A Novel Textile Electrode For Bio-electrical Signal Acquisition

Nowadays, the materials of traditional medical sensors and electronic circuits always made by silicon(Si) based hard electronic materials. In order to get good conductivity effect, the traditional sensors need to be placed one by one on the skin through gelatinizing,resulting in a time consuming and technically demanding process. Therefore, direct contact with human skin for medical sensors, the use of soft biocompatible material is expected.Smart fabrics based sensors, well known as textile electrodes, is an alternative to avoid the skin irritation via directly attaching to skin without gel and it is also an effective way to improve the usability and comfort level of the monitoring systems in clinical medicine.Functionalized textiles and single-wall carbon nanotubes(SWNTs) are both watched materials for wearable technologies. Here, we combine SWNTs with conventional fabrics and report the development of textile electrodes based on conductive cotton yarns for mimic bioelectrical signals acquisition. The conductive cotton yarn was prepared by dipping commercial cotton yarns in well-dispersed SWNTs solution followed by a subsequent drying treatment to allow multidirectional coating of conductive SWNTs around the yarn. Then the proposed textile electrodes were formed by carefully interlacing multiple conductive cotton yarns. Fabrication conditions and electrical properties of a single cotton yarn were investigated by performing various experiments. The results for collecting and transmitting sine-shaped signal and step-functional signal via our textile electrodes prove that they have the ability to collect and transmit weak and fast-change signals without significant attenuation and distortion in a relatively short response time.The successful combination of the flexibility of conventional fabrics and the good conductivity of SWNTs implies their promising application in wearable electronics.