A novel functional electrical stimulation sleeve based on textile-embedded dry electrodes.

BACKGROUND: Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is a rehabilitation technique that enables functional improvements in patients with motor control impairments. This study presents an original design and prototyping method for a smart sleeve for FES applications. The article explains how to integrate a carbon-based dry electrode into a textile structure and ensure an electrical connection between the electrodes and the stimulator for effective delivery of the FES. It also describes the materials and the step-by-step manufacturing processes. RESULTS: The carbon-based dry electrode is integrated into the textile substrate by a thermal compression molding process on an embroidered conductive matrix. This matrix is composed of textile silver-plated conductive yarns and is linked to the stimulator. Besides ensuring the electrical connection, the matrix improves the fixation between the textile substrate and the electrode. The stimulation intensity, the perceived comfort and the muscle torque generated by the smart FES sleeve were compared to hydrogel electrodes. The results show a better average comfort and a higher average stimulation intensity with the smart FES sleeve, while there were no significant differences for the muscle torque generated. CONCLUSIONS: The integration of the proposed dry electrodes into a textile is a viable solution. The wearable FES system does not negatively impact the electrodes' performance, and tends to improve it. Additionally, the proposed prototyping method is applicable to an entire garment in order to target all muscles. Moreover, the process is feasible for industrial production and commercialization since all materials and processes used are already available on the market.

Textile dual-band NFC-A4WP (13.56-6.78 MHz) combiner for wireless energy and data transmission for connected clothing.

An original fully textile combiner is proposed to power supply sensors close to a body with only one centralized source of energy like a smartphone, for instance. A solution is provided for taking into account the requirements of an industrial production process that need to minimize needle movements during an embroidery process. Moreover, the paper shows how to support several wireless power transmission standards that already exist, i.e. NFC and A4WP, or will exist to satisfy the tremendous needs of energy for distributed systems in the IoT domain. In this paper, a new textile-based flexible wireless system enabling communication and energy harvesting is proposed. Analytical, numerical, and experimental studies have been conducted to demonstrate that the structure has two resonant frequencies at 6.8 MHz and 13.6 MHz, which make it suitable for NFC and A4WP standards. Moreover, the losses caused by the system are 2.76 dB and 1.91 dB for A4WP and NFC, respectively. The results are successively presented to highlight the specificities of such textile multi-coils combiners. A method for gaining a resonant structure without any solid electronic component is explained.

Electronic-components less fully textile multiple resonant combiners for body-centric near field communication.

Smart and e-textiles have nowadays an important increasing place in the garment industry. The rise of embedded telecommunications, especially smartphones in our pocket, enables us to provide a power source and a wireless link for smart textiles. The main issue is to develop garments able to receive power from smartphones and communicate with them without flexibility and comfort constraints bound to embedded solid-state electronic components. Consequently, this article aims to develop a fully textile NFC combiner to transfer data and power between a smartphone and sensors without any electronic components. It precisely describes textile NFC multiple combiners composed of textile NFC antennas linked by two-wire transmission lines. Also, theoretical analysis, simulations, and experiments have been conducted to adapt the resonant frequency of such structures to the NFC technology (13.56 MHz). Finally, our article generalizes textile NFC combiner resonant frequency equations for multiple combiners with any number of antennas.