Kirigami-Assisted Textile Capacitive Parallel Plate Strain Sensor for Respiration Monitoring in Saxophone Performance

Highly stretchable textile strain sensors have significant potential for wearable motion monitoring in health related applications. Capacitive sensing offers high linearity and low hysteresis, but its sensitivity is typically limited compared with resistive strain sensing. In this letter, we investigate how auxetic and non-auxetic structural attachments affect the sensitivity and mechanical properties of stretchable parallel plate textile sensors. We show that a kirigami enhanced capacitive parallel plate strain sensor improves sensitivity by ∼34%, to reach a gauge factor of 1.11, while only increasing required straining force by ∼20%. This sensor was integrated into a wearable belt for respiratory monitoring during saxophone performance.