A WiFi tracking device printed directly on textile for wearable electronics applications

Abstract

A WiFi Tracking Device Printed Directly on Textile for Wearable Electronics Applications Bauyrzhan KrykpayevWearable technology is quickly becoming commonplace in our everyday life -fitness and health monitors, smart watches, and Google Glass, just to name a few. It is very clear that in near future the wearable technology will only grow. One of the biggest wearable fields is the E-textiles. E-textiles empower clothes with new functionality by enhancing fabrics with electronics and interconnects. The main obstacle to the development of E-textile field is the relative difficulty and large tolerance in its manufacturing as compared to the standard circuit production. Current methods such as the application of conductive foils, embroidering of conductive wires and treatment with conductive coatings do not possess efficient, fast and reliable mass production traits inherent to the electronic industry. On the other hand, the method of conductive printing on textile has the potential to unlock the efficiency similar to PCB production, due to its roll-to-roll and reel-to-reel printing capabilities. Furthermore, printing on textiles is a common practice to realize graphics, artwork, etc. and thus adaptability to conductive ink printing will be relatively easier. Even though conductive printing is a fully additive process, the end circuit layout is very similar to the one produced via PCB manufacture. However, due to high surface roughness and porosity of textiles, efficient and reliable printing on textile has remained elu-

Flexible 2.4 GHz Node for Body Area Networks With a Compact High-Gain Planar Antenna

“…A reference PIFA from Texas Instruments with 3.3 dBi gain [14], widely utilised in research and industry [11], has been simulated and fabricated for benchmarking. The designs were tuned for a 25 µm thick Polyimide substrate with 12 µm copper, and a 12 µm epoxy adhesive layer.…”

“…The flexible antennas were fabricated by etching polyimide copper laminates [9], or 3D and inkjet printing of the conductor where the antenna's efficiency is adversely reduced due to the material's conductivity [10]. Only the work by Krykpayev et al and Mihajlovic et al demonstrates wireless transmitters realised on a flexible substrate [11,12]. However, the utilisation of reference antenna designs makes the nodes susceptible to detuning by human proximity [13].…”

A wearable tracking device inkjet-printed on textile

“…True E-textiles implementation can potentially be accomplished via conductive printing since printing the circuit layout directly on textiles, can eliminate the rigidness coming from PCB substrate, as shown in our previous work [28]. This method is already widely exploited to print on different substrates including paper and plastic [29][30][31][32].…”

Measuring Biosignals with Single Circuit Boards

“…Several reviews can be found dealing with biosignal measurements in general [ 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 ], or with textile integration of single circuit boards [ 54 , 55 , 56 ], thus these topics are omitted here. This review instead gives an overview of some typical applications of single circuit boards for biosignal detection, mostly based on Arduino or Raspberry Pi, which is recently not available in the scientific literature.…”