Facile Construction of Self-Powered Electronic Textiles for Comprehensive Respiration Analysis

Respiration is one of the most important physiological processes of the human body. Continuous monitoring of respiration with wearable sensors can provide abundant information related to the health status of the respiratory system. However, the vast majority of the developed respiration sensors are constructed on nontextile substrates, resulting in dissatisfactory convenience, comfortness, and aesthetics. Additionally, special micro-/nanomaterials are inevitably involved to construct the respiration sensors, which pose potential hazards to the human body due to the exfoliation and inhalation of these micro-/nanomaterials. Here, humidity- and temperature-sensitive electronic textiles (e-Textiles) are presented, which are fabricated based on easily accessible and biofriendly materials (e.g., sodium chloride, glycerin, aluminum fiber, carbon fiber, and polyvinyl alcohol). Moreover, the proposed e-Textiles use a potentiometric sensing mechanism, featuring self-powered signal outputs and ultralow power consumption. The humidity and temperature-sensing functionalities can also be in situ integrated into commercial masks for constructing full-textile and all-in-one e-Masks for comprehensive respiration monitoring. As demonstrations, both single-point respiration monitoring (e.g., intensity, frequency, etc.) and 2D respiratory analysis (i.e., airflow distribution) can be realized with the e-Masks. This work provides a facile and scalable approach to manufacture self-powered and fully fabric respiration sensors for comprehensive respiratory analysis. A facile strategy for scalable construction of humidity- and temperature-sensitive electronic textiles with easily accessible and biofriendly raw materials is proposed and demonstrated based on a potentiometric sensing mechanism, featuring self-powered property. Based on this new sensing principle, fully fabric and self-powered smart e-Masks can be facilely fabricated for different modes of respiration analysis (i.e., single-point, 2D).image (c) 2024 WILEY-VCH GmbH