Temperature sensitive fabric for monitoring dermal temperature variations

Abstract

Electronic fabrics and smart textiles are advancing biomedical research for use in a variety of ambulatory, diagnostic, and therapeutic devices. New materials and technologies are making it possible to continuously monitor important parameters for health and wellness applications. This chapter will discuss a resistive, fabric-based temperature sensor that can determine temperature between 25ºC and 45ºC by monitoring variations in the material’s electrical resistance. The measured resistance of the material decreases with increasing temperature, indicating that this fabric sensor has a negative temperature coefficient of resistance, or α and sometimes called the TCR, which is approximately -0.228 ± 0.03%/ºC averaged over three separate sensors. These results indicate that this material’s electronic conductivity behaves analogous to semiconductor materials and would classify this device as a thermistor.