Development of E-textile electrodes: Washability and mechanical stresses

Abstract

E-textile, as a growing field in the current era, gained a lot of attention and currently, some tremendous outcomes of these fields can be seen. They are being used in specific functional requirements depending on application types in various fields including medicals, military, safety and leisure, etc. E-textile structures can contain various elements including wearable motherboards, sensors, electrodes, antennas, actuators, and power sources. These components are integrated with available textile materials according to their usage requirements. For the use of e-textiles in daily life and to make them popular with consumers, these products must be reliable and reusable for a prolonged time. The e-textile market has developed rapidly in the past few years especially in the applications of wireless communication, monitoring, gaming, and data collection. Among these applications, products related to health monitoring gained attraction due to their importance in diagnosing the real-time health problems of the customers. The current study is focused on wearable ECG electrodes to make them reliable and washable. Embroidered electrodes are prepared and washed multiple times to check the washing impact on ECG signals performance. Available mechanical tests are performed to predict equivalent damage as during washing. Hence these predictions, in the coming future, can be used to check, analyse and predict the washability of e-textile prototypes at different stages of manufacturing without actually washing of samples for a multiple numbers of wash cycles.