A Single-Ply and Knit-Only Textile Sensing Matrix for Mapping Body Surface Pressure

Wearable sensing fabrics have great potential for applications such as human-computer interaction, motion monitoring, and human shape reconstruction. However, existing fabric sensors tend to sacrifice wearing comfort for sensing functionality, which restricts their application scenarios and hampers long-term usability due to poor wearability. To address this challenge, a novel fabric structure was designed to work with a flat knitting machine to realize a single-ply and knit-only textile pressure-sensing matrix. The sensing fabric has a sensing range of 0.255–35.65kPa, with a maximum sensitivity of 0.72kPa$^{-{1}}$. Although its sensing performance fluctuates under fatigue testing, washing and drying, folding, and stretching operations, it still supports use. It also has thermal comfort performance comparable to a regular T-shirt. We produced a pair of sensing shorts containing 256 sensing units and collected a total of 224483 frames of data containing 18 postures from six participants. Posture classification using ResNet-18 achieved 88.2% accuracy.