A Wearable Textile Thermograph

Abstract

In medicine, temperature changes can indicate important underlying pathologies such as wound infection. While thermographs for the detection of wound infection exist, a textile substrate offers a preferable solution to the designs that exist in the literature, as a textile is very comfortable to wear. This work presents a fully textile, wearable, thermograph created using temperature-sensing yarns. As described in earlier work, temperature-sensing yarns are constructed by encapsulating an off-the-shelf thermistor into a polymer resin micro-pod and then embedding this within the fibres of a yarn. This process creates a temperature-sensing yarn that is conformal, drapeable, mechanically resilient, and washable. This work first explored a refined yarn design and characterised its accuracy to take absolute temperature measurements. The influence of contact errors with the refined yarns was explored seeing a 0.24 ± 0.03 measurement error when the yarn was held just 0.5 mm away from the surface being measured. Subsequently, yarns were used to create a thermograph. This work characterises the operation of the thermograph under a variety of simulated conditions to better understand the functionality of this type of textile temperature sensor. Ambient temperature, insulating material, humidity, moisture, bending, compression and stretch were all explored. This work is an expansion of an article published in The 4th International Conference on Sensor and Applications.