Fully printed and multifunctional graphene-based wearable e-textiles for personalized healthcare applications
PhD student Md Rashedul Islam, from the CFPR Graphene Application Laboratory, published his latest paper on wearable electronic textiles for personalised healthcare applications in iScience Volume 25, Issue 3.
Wearable e-textiles have gained huge tractions due to their potential for non-invasive health monitoring. However, manufacturing of multifunctional wearable e-textiles remains challenging, due to poor performance, comfortability, scalability, and cost. In the article, a fully printed, highly conductive, flexible, and machine-washable e-textiles platform that stores energy and monitors physiological conditions including bio-signals was reported.
The approach includes highly scalable printing of graphene-based inks on a rough and flexible textile substrate, followed by a fine encapsulation to produce highly conductive machine-washable e-textiles platform. The produced e-textiles were extremely flexible, conformal, and able to detect activities of various body parts. The printed in-plane supercapacitor provided an aerial capacitance of ∼3.2 mFcm−2 (stability ∼10,000 cycles). Rashedul’s paper also demonstrated that such e-textiles was able to record brain activity (an electroencephalogram, EEG) and was comparable to conventional rigid electrodes. The author expects this could potentially lead to a multifunctional garment of graphene-based e-textiles that can act as flexible and wearable sensors powered by the energy stored in graphene-based textile supercapacitors.
Additional authors: Shaila Afroj, Christopher Beach, Mohammad Hamidul Islam, Carinna Parraman, Amr Abdelkader, Alexander J. Casson, Kostya S. Novoselov and Nazmul Karim.
