The garment based wearable technology market for fitness and health applications is expected to grow exponentially in the next decade. For these garments to perform as devices, however, it is essential that new functional fibers and yarns be designed and synthesized such that they be integrated into the textile manufacturing processes. These innovative fibers will provide new modes of diagnosis and offer new medical information that cannot be collected using existing technology. By creating meter-scale functional yarns from electrospun polymer fibers, we investigate the yarn architecture and the resulting mechanical strength such that they can be knitted on a digital knitting machine with embedded chemical receptors. We demonstrate several knitted prototypes of chromogenic chemosensors that can detect humidity, pH, temperature and electrolytes.<br/>

Development of scalable knittable functional polymer yarns

255th National Meeting (2018)

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