Everyday use sustainable, washable and comfortable wearable electronic-textiles for personalised health monitoring could soon be reality.
- Researchers at UWE Bristol, in collaboration with industrial partner KYMIRA, have successfully prepared a prototype of the wearable electronic textile: a simple piece of fabric which when placed around a wrist monitors a heartrate and can be worn and washed at least 10 times without compromising its monitoring ability.
- The researchers were led by Senior Research Fellow Shaila Afroj at the Centre for Print Research, UWE Bristol.
The Work: The researchers are utilising the advantages of the new promising material ‘graphene’ which shows incredible thermal and electrical conductivity, high elasticity, strength, lightweight and transparency.
- As every atom in graphene is exposed to its environment, it can sense any small changes in its surroundings, which makes it an ideal material for sensors application.
- The team is also working towards a goal to keep sustainability at the core of the research activities. Instead of buying off-the-shelf graphene which can vary substantially in terms of the properties, the team working in the Graphene Lab at the CFPR prepares its own graphene from scratch to be able to tune it to make it the best possible candidate for sensing application.
- They researchers are also avoiding commonly used solvents which are known to be toxic to humans and the environment, and even carcinogenic, and replace those with water (where the graphene is mostly unstable) to make the device the safest possible for the environment and the user.
- The research also uses inkjet printing for digital fabrication of conductive tracks of graphene on to textile substrate. This fabrication produces 10 picolitres of tiny drops of material on demand, which makes it theoretically an option to print with zero material waste and minimum water usage.
- This is a challenging method considering the ink preparation required to perfect and achieve high resolution printing of continuous conductive track.
- The researchers have also developed the very first all inkjet-printed graphene-based conductive patterns for wearable e-textile applications and has also co-developed highly conductive, scalable, and machine washable graphene-based e-textiles for multifunctional wearable electronic applications.
What They Said:
This is an exciting development in this area of research; it has brought invaluable knowledge as we continue to develop this technology. Such wearable e-textiles could be used for monitoring post-surgery patients, infants and babies, patients in triage at hospital, and for health-monitoring of the elderly. It could also enable early detection of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic cases of COVID-19, potentially reducing the community transmission via remote monitoring of infectious diseases.
— Shaila Afroj
Senior Research Fellow
Centre for Print Research
