Wearable technology is widely used for collecting information about the human body and its movement by placing sensors on the body. This paper presents research into electronic textile strain sensors designed specifically for wearable applications which need to be lightweight, robust, and comfortable. In this paper, sixteen stretch sensors, each with different conductive stretch fabrics, are evaluated: EeonTex (Eeonyx Corporation), knitted silver-plated yarn, and knitted spun stainless steel yarn. The sensors’ performance is tested using a tensile tester while monitoring their resistance with a microcontroller. Each sensor was analyzed for its sensitivity, linearity, hysteresis, responsiveness, and fatigue through a series of dynamic and static tests. The findings show that for wearable applications a subset of the silver-plated yarn sensors had better ranked performance in terms of sensitivity, linearity, and steady state. EeonTex was found to be the most responsive, and the stainless steel yarn performed the worst, which may be due to the characteristics of the knit samples under test.

This paper presents research about design a textile-based stretch sensor for making a reliable sensing system for dance movement sensing. We examined sixteen textile-based conductive stretch sensors that were made with commercially produced conductive materials. Through the analysis of their sensitivity, linearity, hysteresis, responsiveness, and fatigue, a silver-plated conductive fabric, Technik-tex P130B, shows the best performance for dance movement sensing. Then, we tested the bonding technique, and washability of Technik-tex P130B-made sensors. The finding shows that bonding makes a noticeable impact on sensor performance. Both bonding and washing increase the sensor’s resistance. Technik-tex P130B on one side bonding has the best performance for dance movement sensing. This reliable and washable textile-based stretch sensor is utilised for dance bodysuit making for further development.