Personal wearable devices are considered
important in
advanced
healthcare, military, and sports applications. Among them, e-textiles
are the best candidates because of their intrinsic conformability
without any additional device installation. However, e-textile manufacturing
to date has a high process complexity and low design flexibility.
Here, we report the direct laser writing of e-textiles by converting
raw Kevlar textiles to electrically conductive laser-induced graphene
(LIG) via femtosecond laser pulses in ambient air. The resulting LIG
has high electrical conductivity and chemical reliability with a low
sheet resistance of 2.86 Ω/□. Wearable multimodal e-textile
sensors and supercapacitors are realized on different types of Kevlar
textiles, including nonwoven, knit, and woven structures, by considering
their structural textile characteristics. The nonwoven textile exhibits
high mechanical stability, making it suitable for applications in
temperature sensors and micro-supercapacitors. On the other hand,
the knit textile possesses inherent spring-like stretchability, enabling
its use in the fabrication of strain sensors for human motion detection.
Additionally, the woven textile offers special sensitive pressure-sensing
networks between the warp and weft parts, making it suitable for the
fabrication of bending sensors used in detecting human voices. This
direct laser synthesis of arbitrarily patterned LIGs from various
textile structures could result in the facile realization of wearable
electronic sensors and energy storage.