Hee Jin Kim  Taehwan Lim  Dae Young Lim  Sohee Lee

Vol. 59,  No. 6, pp. 306-313, Dec.  2022
10.12772/TSE.2022.59.306

Conductive textile Screen printing ECG (electrocardiogram) Smart clothing smart textile

PDF

Ambulatory and real-time electrocardiography (ECG) enable the modified monitoring of cardiovascular diseases and more precise patient condition diagnosis. Although the Holter monitor is widely used to record cardiograms due to its wireless nature, an ideal ECG monitoring system must be lightweight, soft, and accessibility without discomfort. Therefore, smart electronic clothing including conductive electrodes and circuits is an ideal platform to monitor ECG for addressing the suggested requirements. Accordingly, in this study, we have developed an ECG monitoring system on conventional textiles via screen printing, which is ideal for readily fabricating the desired conductive patterns onto the fabric. An affordable silver paste was used to prepare an electronic surface on the fabric, and this fabric was integrated into daily clothing for accessibility. We demonstrated that the screen-printed Ag paste showed lower electrical resistance than conventional circuits. Furthermore, the printed circuits exhibited electrical stretchability when elongated completely. Additionally, the electrical properties of the circuits displayed little difference with 500x stretching deformation, which restored completely after 24 h. The washing durability results showed that the screen-printed circuits were reusable, implying affordable and sustainable technologies. Lastly, the ECG monitoring performance of the smart textile prototype (Ag paste printed fabric integrated daily clothing) was compared with that of traditional wet-type Ag/AgCl electrodes. The result demonstrated that the smart textile prototype could record higher quality ECG signals than the conventional electrode. Consequently, this study opens the possibility of comfortable, affordable, and wearable physiologic signal monitoring system.