Developing Novel Temperature Sensing Garments for Health Monitoring Applications

Abstract

Embedding temperature sensors within textiles provides an easy method for measuring skin temperature. Skin temperature measurements are an important parameter for a variety of health monitoring applications, where changes in temperature can indicate changes in health. This work uses a temperature sensing yarn, which was fully characterized in previous work, to create a series of temperature sensing garments: armbands, a glove, and a sock. The purpose of this work was to develop the design rules for creating temperature sensing garments and to understand the limitations of these devices. Detailed design considerations for all three devices are provided. Experiments were conducted to examine the effects of contact pressure on skin contact temperature measurements using textile-based temperature sensors. The temperature sensing sock was used for a short user trial where the foot skin temperature of five healthy volunteers was monitored under different conditions to identify the limitations of recording textile-based foot skin temperature measurements. The fit of the sock significantly affected the measurements. In some cases, wearing a shoe or walking also heavily influenced the temperature measurements. These variations show that textile-based foot skin temperature measurements may be problematic for applications where small temperature differences need to be measured.

Flexible Temperature Sensor Integration into E-Textiles Using Different Industrial Yarn Fabrication Processes

“…This technique of fabricating textiles with predefined channels for incorporating sensing yarns has numerous advantages. These include the precise positioning of the sensing areas of the yarns and the ability to remove the sensing yarns from the textile if the yarn malfunctions or during the recycling of the textile [40].…”

“…The arm band was taken off during the exercise task to eliminate measurement errors caused by movement artefacts and contact issues between the sensor and the skin. In the future, these issues could be overcome by using a well fitted armband composed of elastane [40]. The armband was then wrapped around the upper arm and the temperature was measured for 5 min.…”

Wash Testing of Electronic Yarn

“…In order to fully understand electronic yarn failures during washing a comparative study of a range of E-yarns, with different sizes of components, was therefore necessary. As E-yarn have now been incorporated into prototype garments [16,19,20] the necessity to conduct these wash tests had become more pressing.…”

Flexible Sensors—From Materials to Applications

“…Electrical contact sensors change their electrical properties with respect to temperature. Most of the flexible temperature sensors fall into the electrical contact sensors category and they are either resistive [103,337,339,341,342,344,345,349,[437][438][439][440][441][442][443][444][445][446][447][448][449][450][451], pyroelectric [296,375,[452][453][454][455][456][457], capacitive [145,[458][459][460], thermoelectric [145,458,459], transistors [11,460], or diodes [441]. The performance of a temperature sensor is generally assessed by investigating its temperature sensitivity, temperature range, hysteresis and response time.…”