Textile Pressure Sensor for Muscle Activity and Motion Detection

This paper presents a pure textile, capacitive pressure sensor designed for integration into clothing to measure pressure on human body. The applications fields cover all domains where a soft and bendable sensor with a high local resolution is needed, e.g. in rehabilitation, pressure-sore prevention or motion detection due to muscle activities. We developed several textile sensors with spatial resolution of 2 times 2 cm and an average error below 4 percent within the measurement range 0 to 10 N/cm². Applied on the upper arm the textile pressure sensor determines the deflection of the forearm between 0 and 135 degrees due to the muscle bending.