Textile based temperature and humidity sensor elements for healthcare applications

This paper presents a research focused on embroidered temperature and humidity sensor elements for smart textile applications in health and medical care. Smart textile products face desirable textile properties for health care use include durability, “launderability” (washing resistance), flexibility and non-toxicity and the comfort aspect of clothing is also very important. For these reasons, the presented research was concentrated on the development of sensor elements based on specially prepared conductive yarns which are integrated into textile fabric with the familiar textile technique - embroidery and connected to control unit through snap fasteners. All the sensor element manufacturing steps are fully compatible with textile processing techniques. The preliminary investigation into the design, manufacturing and testing of the textile based temperature and humidity sensor elements are described in the paper.