Increasing demand for wearable healthcare synergistically advances the field of electronic textiles, or e‐textiles, allowing for ambulatory monitoring of vital health signals. Despite great promise, the pragmatic deployment of e‐textiles in clinical practice remains challenged due to the lack of a method in producing custom‐designed e‐textiles at high spatial resolution across a large area. To this end, a programmable dual‐regime spray that enables the direct custom writing of functional nanoparticles into arbitrary fabrics at sub‐millimeter resolution over meter scale is employed. The resulting e‐textiles retain the intrinsic fabric properties in terms of mechanical flexibility, water‐vapor permeability, and comfort against multiple uses and laundry cycles. The e‐textiles tightly fit various body sizes and shapes to support the high‐fidelity recording of physiological and electrophysiological signals on the skin under ambulatory conditions. Pilot field tests in a remote health‐monitoring setting with a large animal, such as a horse, demonstrate the scalability and utility of the e‐textiles beyond conventional devices. This approach will be suitable for the rapid prototyping of custom e‐textiles tailored to meet various clinical needs.
Previous studies have shown that metallic coatings can be successfully cold sprayed onto several polymer substrates. However, the electrical performance of the cold-sprayed polymers is not generally enough to utilize them as an electronic device. In this study, an environment-friendly metallization technique has been proposed to achieve highly electrically conductive metal patterns onto polymer substrates using cold spray deposition and subsequent electroless copper plating (ECP). Copper feedstock powder was cold sprayed onto the surface of the acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) parts. The as-cold sprayed powders then served as the activating agent for the selective ECP to modify the surface of the polymers to be electrically conductive. A series of characterizations were conducted to investigate the morphology, analyze the surface chemistry, evaluate the electrical performance, mechanical adhesion, and mechanical strength performance of the fabricated coatings. Moreover, simple electrical circuits were presented for the ABS parts through the described method. Findings demonstrated that low-pressure cold spray (LPCS) copper deposition followed by the ECP processes could be used as an environmental-friendly manufacturing method of electrically conductive patterns on ABS polymer.
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