Wearable Personal Network Based on Fabric Serial Bus Using Electrically Conductive Yarn

E-textile technology has earned a great deal of interest in many fields; however, existing wearable network protocols are not optimized for use with conductive yarn. In this paper, some of the basic properties of conductive textiles and requirements on wearable personal area networks (PANs) are reviewed. Then, we present a wearable personal network (WPN), which is a four-layered wearable PAN using bus topology. We have designed the WPN to be a lightweight protocol to work with a variety of microcontrollers. The profile layer is provided to make the application development process easy. The data link layer exchanges frames in a master-slave manner in either the reliable or best-effort mode. The lower part of the data link layer and the physical layer of WPN are made of a fabric serial-bus interface which is capable of measuring bus signal properties and adapting to medium variation. After a formal verification of operation and performances of WPN, we implemented WPN communication modules (WCMs) on small flexible printed circuit boards. In order to demonstrate the behavior of our WPN on a textile, we designed a WPN tutorial shirt prototype using implemented WCMs and conductive yarn.