Carbon Nanotube Textile Skin Electrodes for ECG Sensing

Advanced carbon materials, metallic nanoparticles and conductive polymers are widely used for fabricating textile electrodes. Among the carbon materials, carbon nanotubes (CNT) demonstrate high aspect ratio, excellent mechanical properties, ultralight weight, good thermal and electrical properties. However, most of the electrodes fabricated using CNTs are composite film and lack breathability and comfort. Here we report the fabrication of CNTs wrapped textile yarns which are strong and flexible for different textile processing. We developed a textile processable yarn by wrapping CNTs over cotton and spandex yarn in a core-shell structure. The spandex core renders the yarn with high stretchability and ultra-conformability to the skin providing high reliability against mechanical deformation and motion artifacts. No adhesive and tethering required for our developed electrode to measure ECG and could be worn and washed as a regular textile. We demonstrated that the systematic design of the electrode will record comparable ECG signals of Ag/AgCl electrode in different body movement conditions.