A textile based capacitive pressure sensor

This paper introduces an approach for decoding the pressure information exerted over a broad piece of fabric by means of capacitive sensing. The proposed sensor includes a distributed passive array of capacitors (i.e. an array where no active elements are involved), whose capacitance depends on the pressure exerted on the textile surface, and an electronic system that acquire and process the subsequent capacitance variations. Capacitors can be made in different ways, though, in our demonstrator they have been implemented between rows and columns of conductive fibers patterned on the two opposite sides of an elastic synthetic foam. Measures performed over a prototype has been demonstrated the reliability of the approach by detecting pressure images at 3 F/s and by measuring capacitances as low as hundreds of fF spaced apart at meters of distance.