Professor Carlo Menon’s research group at ETH Zurich has created a brand-new smart textile sensor that can gauge how worn out a person becomes when engaging in physical exercise. This invention may be able to stop accidents brought on by physical exertion injuries.
The researchers built the sensor inside a pair of athletic leggings, enabling users to observe in real-time when they are nearing their limit and when to take a break. According to a news statement from ETH Zurich, the sensor is constructed of a specific kind of yarn that tracks how tiredness affects a person’s gait, including shortening steps and abnormal movement patterns.
Menon explained that the sensor is so close to the body “we can perfectly record bodily motions without the person even realizing it.”
The sensor’s construction is distinctive, with a spiraled inner fiber consisting of conductive, elastic rubber wound around a stiff wire covered in a thin plastic coating. Stretchy running pants with an embedded sensor’s thigh region will stretch and slacken in time with the wearer’s strides, changing the electric field and capacitor charge. This enables the sensor to record body motions without the wearer even realizing it accurately.
These two fibers generate an electric field and serve as electrodes. According to Tyler Cuthbert, a postdoc in Menon’s team, an electric charge may be stored in them when combined.
Researchers tracked how the electric impulses altered as runners grew more exhausted while wearing sports leggings fitted with a sensor. They then utilized this pattern to create a model that forecasts degrees of tiredness, which they may apply to their brand-new textile sensor.
The sensor was given a loop antenna made of conducting yarn that was sewn directly into the leggings to transmit electrical impulses to a smartphone wirelessly, as the researchers did.
The electrical signal is transmitted from the sensor to the antenna at a specific frequency that a smartphone may pick up. A smartphone app records and performs a real-time evaluation of the signal pattern produced by the wearer’s motions, which has a continually varying frequency.
The researchers have filed for one of ETH Zurich’s Pioneer Fellowships to assist them in developing their prototype into a product ready for the market. Menon claims that the sensor may find use in fields other than sports, such as the workplace, to avoid accidents caused by weariness and in rehabilitative medicine.
