Symposium SB10-Soft Materials for Sensors and Actuators in e-textiles and e-skins

E-textiles and e-skins with embedded sensors and electronics receive widespread interest for applications ranging from health monitoring, tactile devices to displays and antennas, as well as energy harvesting and storage. At the same time there is growing interest in actuating e-textiles for adapting shape, supporting motion of limbs, haptic feedback, or even acting as exoskeletons. For these e-textile actuators, high-performance materials are combined with soft robotic approaches. The sensitivity of e-skins is often coupled with artificial intelligence to enable autonomy in driving e-textile actuators.

Some key challenges of e-textiles include (1) transferring actuation approaches into development of fibers, yarns and fabrics with an optimal combination of electrical and mechanical properties, (2) energy efficiency (3) developing effective manufacturing methods (4) issues of use, ‘wear’ and ‘washing’ and (5) methods to reuse and recycle. Some key challenges in e-skins include (1) compact integration methodologies to include advanced bionic features, (2) constructing stretchy structures, (3) enhancing sensitivity, selectivity, and reliability of the sensors.

This symposium will provide a forum for collaborative discussions to address these challenges, in order to address both academic and industrial research needs and further developments. It will bring together researchers from highly diverse, interdisciplinary backgrounds such as materials engineers, polymer chemists, device physicists as well as entrepreneurs from industry.

Sessions will be dedicated to the selection of materials and development of yarns and fibres, approaches to implement actuation in textiles, and failure mechanisms and modelling. Sessions will also focus on the materials and devices developed to establish the form factor of e-skins and on the applications for e-textiles, wearables, nearables, and soft robotic hybrids will be reported. Challenges in commercializing the e-textile and e-skin devices will be discussed from both academia and industry perspectives.

Topics will include:

Tailored materials for e-textiles and e-skins
Wearability, washability, and reliability
Commercialization for various applications
Sensing and actuating in textiles and garments
Tactile sensors and haptic feedback
Conformable and/or stretchable sensor skins
Soft robotics for exoskeletons and protection
Soft and wearable actuators
Sustainability and recycling
Mechanical/thermal/electrical modelling
Interconnects and interfacing
Innovative device structures

Invited Speakers:

Ana Claudia Arias (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Michael Bartlett (Virginia Tech, USA)
Stephen Beeby (University of Southampton, United Kingdom)
Tricia Breen Carmichael (University of Windsor, Canada)
Anastasia Elias (University of Alberta, Canada)
Tae-il Kim (Sungkyunkwan University, Republic of Korea)
Ahyeon Koh (Binghamton University, The State University of New York, USA)
Pooi See Lee (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Darren Lipomi (University of California, San Diego, USA)
Jose Martinez (Linköping University, Sweden)
Aurelie Mosse (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, France)
Nils-Krister Perrson (University of Boras, Sweden)
Vanessa Sanchez (Rice University, USA)
Anne Ladegaard Skov (Technical University of Denmark, Denmark)
Chad Webb (Rhaeos Inc., USA)
Myung-Han Yoon (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea)