The design and development of a temperature sensing vest for the monitoring of on-body skin temperature

Abstract

This work presents a temperature sensing vest that was created using electronic yarn (E-yarn) technology that is capable of measuring skin temperature at two sights on the chest and scapula. Temperature sensing E-yarns were engineered by soldering small-scale thermistors onto Litz wires, encapsulating them within polymer micro-pods, along with supporting yarns, and covering these in a textile braid. The temperature sensing E-yarns in this work also incorporated a resistor to complete the voltage divider circuit required to record temperature using a microcontroller. The E-yarns were calibrated against skin mountable thermistors, which are the gold standard for on-body temperature sensing. The E-yarns were subsequently incorporated into the tight-knitted vest, creating close contact between the wearer and E-yarns. This work presents an initial human trial, where a participant conducted some simple activities where skin temperature was recorded with both E-yarns and skin-mounted thermistors. As reasonably good correlation between the two sensing modalities was observed