Textile sensors transform our everyday clothing into a means to track movement and bio-signals in a completely unobtrusive way. One major hindrance to the adoption of "smart" clothing is the difficulty encountered with connections and space when scaling up the number of sensors. There is a lack of research addressing a key limitation in wearable electronics: connections between rigid and textile elements are often unreliable and they require interfacing sensors in a way incompatible with textile mass production methods. We introduce a prototype garment, compact readout circuit, and algorithm to measure localized strain along multiple regions of a fibre. We employ a helical auxetic yarn sensor with tunable sensitivity along its length to selectively respond to strain signals. We demonstrate distributed sensing in clothing, monitoring arm joint angles from a single continuous fibre. Compared to optical motion capture, we achieve around 5{\deg} error in reconstructing shoulder, elbow, and wrist joint angles.
@article{arxiv.2402.09057,
title = {Distributed Sensing Along Fibres for Smart Clothing},
author = {Brett C. Hannigan and Tyler J. Cuthbert and Chakaveh Ahmadizadeh and Carlo Menon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.09057},
year = {2024}
}