Highly stretchable fiber-shaped e-textiles for strain/pressure sensing, full-range human motions detection, health monitoring, and 2D force mapping

Textile-based electronics (e-textiles) have attracted huge attention in wearable sensors recently. Even though highly sensitive textile-based pressure sensors and highly stretchable textile-based strain sensors are widely researched and reported in recent years, it is still full of challenges to develop high stretchable textile-based sensors simultaneously and satisfy strain and pressure sensing, which is necessary for full-range detection of human motions. On the other hand, compared to traditional planar e-textiles, fiber-shaped e-textiles have plenty of advantages due to their fibrous architecture with lightweight, portable, skin compliant, and easily weave properties. In this work, a fiber-shaped textile, knitted with hierarchical polyurethane (PU) fibers, is used to fabricate a multifunctional e-textile by coating of silver nanowires (AgNWs) and styrene–butadiene–styrene. Due to the AgNWs conductive networks, the inherent stretchability of PU fibers, and the hierarchical structure, the as-prepared e-textile exhibits high conductivity, high stretchability, high sensitivity, and multi-detection of strain and pressure. What is more, the fabricated multifunctional e-textiles are also successfully weaved into electronic fabric for 2D force mapping. The simple, scalable strategy endows the multifunctional e-textiles great potentials in full-range detection and health care areas.