Textile Building Blocks: Toward Simple, Modularized, And Standardized Smart Textile

Textiles are pervasive in our life, covering human body and objects, as well as serving in industrial applications. In its everyday use of individuals, smart textile becomes a promising medium for monitoring, information retrieval, and interaction. While there are many applications in sport, health care, and industry, the state-of-theart smart textile is still found only in niche markets. To gain mass-market capabilities, we see the necessity of generalizing and modularizing smart textile production and application development, which on the one end lowers the production cost and on the other end enables easy deployment. In this chapter, we demonstrate our initial effort in modularization. By devising types of universal sensing fabrics for conductive and non-conductive patches, smart textile construction from basic, reusable components can be made. Using the fabric blocks, we present four types of sensing modalities, including resistive pressure, capacitive, bioimpedance, and biopotential. In addition, we present amulti-channel textile-electronics interface and various applications built on the top of the basic building blocks by 'cut and sew' principle.