A Highly Durable and UV-Resistant Graphene-Based Knitted Textile Sensing Sleeve for Human Joint Angle Monitoring and Gesture Differentiation

Flexible strain sensors based on textiles have attracted extensive attention owing to their light weight, flexibility, and comfort when wearing. However, challenges in integrating textile strain sensors into wearable sensing devices include the need for outstanding sensing performance, long-term monitoring stability, and fast, convenient integration processes to achieve comprehensive monitoring. The scalable fabrication technique presented here addresses these challenges by incorporating customizable graphene-based sensing networks into knitted structures, thus creating sensing sleeves for precise motion detection and differentiation. The performance and real-world application potential of the sensing sleeve are evaluated by its precision in angle estimation and complex joint motion recognition during intra- and intersubject studies. For intra-subject analysis, the sensing sleeve only exhibits a 2.34 degrees angle error in five different knee activities among 20 participants, and the sensing sleeves show up to 94.1% and 96.1% accuracy in the gesture classification of knee and elbow, respectively. For inter-subject analysis, the sensing sleeve demonstrates a 4.21 degrees angle error, and it shows up to 79.9% and 85.5% accuracy in the gesture classification of knee and elbow, respectively. An activity-guided user interface compatible with the sensing sleeves for human motion monitoring in home healthcare applications is presented to illustrate the potential applications. A novel graphene-based knitted textile sensing sleeve is proposed, which is capable of precise human joint angle monitoring and gesture recognition. By applying digital knitting and graphene integration, this wearable device achieves outstanding accuracy in detecting complex joint motions, ensuring high durability and environmental resistance under varied conditions. And it demonstrates huge potential in future home-based rehabilitation training.image (c) 2024 WILEY-VCH GmbH