Fully printed and multifunctional graphene-based wearable e-textiles for personalized healthcare applications

Md Rashedul Islam; Shaila Afroj; Christopher Beach; Mohammad Hamidul Islam; Carinna Parraman; Amr Abdelkader; Alexander J Casson; Kostya S Novoselov; Nazmul Karim

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.103945

Fully printed and multifunctional graphene-based wearable e-textiles for personalized healthcare applications

iScience. 2022 Feb 18;25(3):103945. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.103945. eCollection 2022 Mar 18.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Centre for Print Research (CFPR), University of the West of England, Frenchay, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK.
² Department of EEE, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
³ Department of Design and Engineering, Bournemouth University, Dorset, BH12 5BB UK.
⁴ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore.
⁵ Institute for Functional Intelligent Materials, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117575, Singapore.
⁶ Chongqing 2D Materials Institute, Liangjiang New Area, Chongqing 400714 China.

Abstract

Wearable e-textiles have gained huge tractions due to their potential for non-invasive health monitoring. However, manufacturing of multifunctional wearable e-textiles remains challenging, due to poor performance, comfortability, scalability, and cost. Here, we report a fully printed, highly conductive, flexible, and machine-washable e-textiles platform that stores energy and monitor physiological conditions including bio-signals. The approach includes highly scalable printing of graphene-based inks on a rough and flexible textile substrate, followed by a fine encapsulation to produce highly conductive machine-washable e-textiles platform. The produced e-textiles are extremely flexible, conformal, and can detect activities of various body parts. The printed in-plane supercapacitor provides an aerial capacitance of ∼3.2 mFcm^-2 (stability ∼10,000 cycles). We demonstrate such e-textiles to record brain activity (an electroencephalogram, EEG) and find comparable to conventional rigid electrodes. This could potentially lead to a multifunctional garment of graphene-based e-textiles that can act as flexible and wearable sensors powered by the energy stored in graphene-based textile supercapacitors.

Keywords: Health technology; Materials science; Nanomaterials.