MEMS Seminar: Textile Electronics - System-Driven Strategies for Manufacturing & Design

Textile electronics represents the potential advancement of garments that provide a distributed system of electronics (sensing and energy harvesting) to enable new dynamics in health, fitness, industrial and entertainment applications. Primary challenges exist in the development of this marketplace, namely manufacturable integration strategies for durable and comfortable devices as well as the validation of these devices in real human scenarios. This presentation will review activity in the NEXT (Nano-Extended Textiles) research group at NC State, focused on the use of engineering design principles to develop integration and materials strategies of electronics in textiles that are industry relevant now and novel techniques that enable future industry growth. Through the examination of these methods at a system level, an understanding of their impact and relevance can be defined and iterated for improved performance. Of particular interest is the development of new printing methods that enable improved sensing from the human body. The performance of the textile electronics in relation to complex human scenarios, based on the user's activity and external environment, are assessed to understand sensing performance and self-powered strategies.