Facile Fabrication of High Performance Pen-Ink Decorated Textile Strain Sensor for Human Motion Detection.

Recently, wearable strain sensors have increasingly attracted much attention due to their potential applications in human motion detection and personal health monitoring. To date, it is still a challenge to fabricate flexible strain sensor with both comfort and high performance. In this study, we dip the commercially available spandex/polyamide fabric into common pen ink to prepare a textile strain sensor with good skin affinity. The textile strain sensor exhibits a high gauge factor (~ 62.9) and an excellent linearity (R2 ~ 0.99) in the strain range of 0 to 30%. Before and after washing, the sensor both exhibits high stability in more than 5000 cycles. Owing to the facile integration of the ink-decorated fabric on clothes, the sensor can be conveniently attached to the human body to monitor human motions, thus showing great potential in practical applications.