Woven Electronic Textiles: An Enabling Technology for Health-care Monitoring in Clothing

In this work we present a technology to integrate electronic devices into textiles at the yarn level. This enables the fabrication of electronic textiles that remain bendable and are therefore suitable for sensor integration into clothing (e.g. to measure physiological signals). This technology is applied to integrate digital silicon based temperature sensors into a textile band which is then combined with an undershirt to measure the temperature between skin and clothing. This temperature can be used as an indicator for heat stress experienced by people in high-risk professions, athletes and dementia patients. We demonstrate the capability of this technology by using this undershirt in a 4 hour measurement and a protective clothing scenario. Author