Boxer Underwear Incorporating Textile Moisture Sensor to Prevent Nocturnal Enuresis

Abstract

Around 15% of children still wet their bed after five years old. Although bedwetting alarms have proven to be effective to achieve nighttime dryness, they are cumbersome so children could be reluctant to use them. Therefore, the moisture sensor and wire were made unobtrusive by seamlessly integrated them into fully textile underwear by using conductive yarns. Consequently, the alarm acceptability should be enhanced by improving children’s comfort. Three conductive textile metallic yarns, made of silver or stainless steel, were considered to fabricate the urine leakage sensor. Silver-plated-nylon yarn, which showed the highest electrical conductivity, outperformed the stainless-steel yarns regarding its ability to detect urine leakage as well as its detection speed. Furthermore, it was proven to withstand multiple urine soakings and the following machine-washings, even at high temperature (60 °C). However, the electrical current, necessary to detect the leakage, tends to corrode the silver. Therefore, the detection circuit was adapted. Eventually, the designed leakage sensor was seamlessly integrated into a child’s trunk underwear, into which a miniaturized alarm can be plugged. The resulting textile underwear aims at replacing the rigid alarm system currently available, hence improving the quality of life of enuretic children and help them achieving nighttime dryness.

Interdigital Capacitor-Based Passive LC Resonant Sensor for Improved Moisture Sensing

“…The performance of the equivalent PPC-and IDC-based sensors as a diaper urine sensor was exhaustively measured and qualified in this work. Moreover, time response data of the sensor, missing from other similar papers [1][2][3], revealed a pattern of a rapid decline in frequency followed by a recovery region. Verifying the potential of the proposed sensor in other moisture-sensing applications remains as future work.…”

“…The current work and other recent moisture sensors are compared in Table 4. The current work and that of [3] have significant advantages over those of [1,2], because the former are a passive type. Because active circuitry is needed in [1,2], they can be significantly more expensive than low-cost passive sensors.…”

“…The current work and that of [3] have significant advantages over those of [1,2], because the former are a passive type. Because active circuitry is needed in [1,2], they can be significantly more expensive than low-cost passive sensors. The sensor in [3] is similar to the demonstrated sensor because they both rely on the change in the resonant frequency of the LC tanks.…”

“…Moisture and water content sensing is a prerequisite for various industrial applications, such as urine sensors in the medical industry [1][2][3], sensing moisture content in concrete in the construction industry [4], and sensing soil moisture content in the agricultural industry [5]. The precise sensing of moisture content offers significant control over manufacturing processes, product yield, and quality assurance.…”

Wearable Textile UHF-RFID Sensors: A Systematic Review

“…Currently, metal materials [ 46 ], such as copper, aluminum, iron, silver and gold, and synthetic fiber such as graphite fiber [ 47 , 48 , 49 ] and glass fiber, are popular in the UHF-RFID antennas and sensors designs. Note that metal materials still have better conductive ability than that of some synthetic fiber, thus some synthetic fiber is dealt with metal surface [ 50 ] or twisted by a proportional metal-plated fiber [ 51 , 52 ]. Certainly, compared with metal materials, synthetic fiber has the greatest strength of designability.…”