Temperature Sensitive Fabric For Monitoring Dermal Temperature Variations

Electronic fabrics and smart textiles are advancing biomedical research for use in a variety of ambulatory, diagnostic, and therapeutic devices. New materials and technologies are making it possible to continuously monitor important parameters for health and wellness applications. This chapter will discuss a resistive, fabric-based temperature sensor that can determine temperature between 25 degrees C and 45 degrees C by monitoring variations in the material's electrical resistance. The measured resistance of the material decreases with increasing temperature, indicating that this fabric sensor has a negative temperature coefficient of resistance, or a and sometimes called the TCR, which is approximately -0.228 +/- 0.03%/degrees C averaged over three separate sensors. These results indicate that this material's electronic conductivity behaves analogous to semiconductor materials and would classify this device as a thermistor.