Vaporizing the Limits of Vapor Phase Polymerization for Textile Wearables
In our cover paper, we "vaporize" the limits of vapor-phase polymerization for textile wearables.
Wearable electronics have come a long way from their bulky and cumbersome beginnings, increasingly blending into everyday clothing in both appearance and comfort. The Biomedical and Mobile Health Technology lab is dedicated to developing sensors and electronics that seamlessly integrate into textiles, making wearable technology a natural part of our daily attire. Achieving this vision requires innovation in both material science and data analysis.
In a collaborative project between ETH Zurich and Polytechnique Montréal, our group members Pierre, Alice, Chakaveh, Alexander, Fabio, and Carlo developed high-performance, textile-based capacitive strain sensors for wearable applications and tested them on a glove. They created conductive fibers through vapor-phase polymerization of pyrrole, enhanced by the addition of co-vapor and imidazole, resulting in improved conductivity and durability in stretchable textiles. These advanced fibers were twisted together and integrated into a standard cotton glove, forming a stretchable capacitive sensor capable of precisely detecting the wearer's hand movements, which were read wirelessly by a regular smartphone.
By employing a machine learning model, the system accurately classified 12 different gestures with 100% accuracy. This performance underscores the significant potential of these sensors in advanced wearable technology applications. One could even say the team have “vaporized” the limits of vapor-phase polymerization for textile wearables.
Read the full article by clicking on this link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aisy.202470050
