Muscle activity monitoring with fabric stretch sensors

In this paper, development of a fabric stretch sensor embedded system has been proposed for muscle activity monitoring. It is expected that this product will be proper for monitoring a wide range of human activities mainly due to the characteristics of light-weight and high sensitivity. The fabric sensors developed can be easily attached to almost any types of clothing due to their thin and stretchable natures. The mechanism and performance of the sensors have been characterized by measuring the mechanical and electrical performance along with stretch ratio or strain percent. The data collected would be successfully transmitted to mobile phones through low power consumption BLE connection, and thus muscle activities in real time. As expected, the resultant smart muscle pants could achieve realistic goals through monitoring body movements without any significant loss of wear comforts in normal clothing. This work significantly contributed in enhancing the utility of strain/stretch sensors for development of e-textiles and intended to be a starting point for data collection and analysis of smart fabric embedded sensing technologies.