Textile-Based, Garment-Integrated Sensor Systems Created Using Chemical Vapor Deposition

Commonly-available, mass-produced fabrics, yarns/threads and premade garments can be transformed into a plethora of comfortably-wearable electronic devices upon being coated with films of electronically-active conjugated polymers. Tremendous variation in the surface morphology of conjugated polymer-coated fibers and fabrics can be observed with different coating or processing conditions. In turn, the morphology of the conjugated polymer active layer determines electrical performance and, most importantly, device ruggedness. Chemical vapor deposition allows for a conjugated polymer film to be directly formed on the surface of any premade garment, prewoven fabric or fiber/yarn substrate, without the need for specialized processing conditions, surface pretreatments, detergents or fixing agents. This feature means that soft-electronic coatings can be non-disruptively applied at the end of existing, high-throughput textile and garment manufacturing routines. Further, vapor coating produces conductive materials without any insulating moieties and yields uniform and conformal films on fiber/fabric surfaces that are notably wash- and wear-stable and withstand mechanically-demanding textile manufacturing routines. Our lab has used chemical vapor deposition to develop a suite of loose-fitting, comfortable-to-wear clothing and eye masks for monitoring all needed physiological signals for sleep monitoring. We will the detail the materials science and engineering advances that lead to these various prototypes and contextualize of the features of our device suite (in terms of comfort and capability) as compared to existing sleep monitoring solutions.