A Scalable Textile Strain Sensor Matrix: Design, Implementation, and Application Exploration

The measurement of biomechanical loads is important for various applications, such as healthcare, sports, and human–computer interaction (HCI). To obtain a detailed view of the biomechanical loads, it is necessary to monitor the strain distribution on the body surface which is perpendicular to the pressure. The current strain sensing methods lack scalability and comfort for body-scaled usage. We design a fully textile strain sensor matrix that can be realized based solely on off-the-shelf materials and textile industry machines. The novel matrix design reduces the wiring scale to the square root of the sensor unit scale, enabling a practical, portable, and wearable deployment of strain distribution sensing. We created a matrix with 256 sensing points and explored its applications in both environmental and wearable scenarios. The results prove the necessity of measuring strain distribution that the 3-D biomechanical loads shall be obtained in detail. The data from the on-body applications also show good performance in human posture classification, motion monitoring, and environmental condition recognition.