Flexible Textile‐Based Capacitive Pressure Sensor with Weft Knitted Structure Fabric for Wearable Physiological Monitoring and Human–Computer Interaction

Abstract Flexible textile‐based capacitive pressure sensors demonstrate significant potential for applications in wearable electronics owing to advantageous mechanical and electrical properties. In this paper, we developed a conformable body‐worn capacitive pressure sensor utilizing silver‐coated nylon yarn fabric as electrodes and polylactic acid (PLA) yarn fabric as the dielectric layer. The five knitted structures employed for the fabric electrodes comprised jersey, double jersey, tubular, 1 × 1 rib and 2 × 2 rib. The flexible weft knitted fabric electrodes have an obvious loop structure, moderate thickness, a relatively large gram weight, good air, and moisture permeability. The fabric electrodes also have good conductivity and sensitivity. The sensors with flexible weft knitted structure fabric electrodes have a large range of sensing pressures (>24.5 kPa). The electrode with double jersey has a fast response time of 474 ms, a detection limit of 24.5 Pa, and a relatively good sensitivity was measured to be 0.6141, 0.0334, and 0.0060 kPa −1 for under 0–0.049, 0.049–4.9, and 4.9–24.5 kPa, respectively. Furthermore, the wearable pressure sensor demonstrates capability in real‐time monitoring of human physiological signals. This cost‐effective method provides a framework for capacitive pressure sensors using weft‐knitted fabric, while demonstrating considerable potential for scalable manufacturing in sensor technologies.