Plastic fibers with microfabricated sensors

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it”

Mark Weiser (The computer for the 21st century, 1991)

Objectives

• Fabricate thin-film sensors (temperature, pressue etc) and thin-film transistors (TFTs) on plastic foil
  
• Cut foil into thin plastic stripes
  
• Weave the stripes into a textile sheet
• Build demonstrator using a smart textile that can sense temperature and pressure
  

Status to date

• Cut polyimide foil into stripes as thin as 50micron
• Fabricated gold thermistors to use as woven temperature sensors
• Fabricated and evaluated simple a-Si:H TFTs for use as temperature sensors
• Wove thermistors into a textile band as proof of concept
• Higher sensing functionality by conductive polymer gas sensors
• Humidity sensor based on PEDOT-PSS

Publications

• New Method for Integrating Electronics into Textiles, Thomas Kinkeldei, Kunigunde Cherenack and Gerhard Tröster, 51st TMS Electronic Materials Conference, 2009
• Development and evaluation of temperature sensors for textile integration, Thomas Kinkeldei, Christoph Zysset, Kunigunde Cherenack and Gerhard Tröster, Proceedings of the IEEE Sensors Conference 2009
• Crack prevention of highly bent metal thin films in woven electronic textiles, Thomas Kinkeldei, Christoph Zysset, Kunigunde Cherenack and Gerhard Tröster, International Symposium on Flexible Organic Electronics 2010