Printed electrodes could solve issues with wearable keyboard size
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Printed electrodes could solve issues with wearable keyboard size
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nformation is now accessible at the touch of a button—literally at our fingertips. Be it a smartphone, a tablet, a smartwatch, or a smart glass, compact portable electronic devices play a major role in this revolution. The future of such facile information access lies in devices that integrate with the human body and work in tandem with human physiology. For this reason, several wearable electronic devices have been developed that cover a huge spectrum of design options. Most of them rely on microfabrication techniques that essentially build tinier scaleddown versions of existing applications. This, however, will not work in making a wearable keyboard for an obvious reason: a keyboard has to be a certain size, with the ultimate limiting factor being the size of a human fingertip—roughly an area of 2 cm2. The challenge is to create a wearable keyboard without invoking conventional microfabrication. A research group—which includes Seiichi Takamatsu of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan, Esma Ismailova and George Malliaras of École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne, and their colleagues—has now reported a wearable electrode that is printed on a textile. The team reasoned that if they
are situated too closely, the expansion event is interrupted and energy pushback occurs, causing the velocity to be impeded. However, when the spacing between hurdles is increased, they could achieve a higher fl ame velocity even though the overall mass was decreasing. The underlying reason for this is a result of the architecture, which facilitates transport of these hot particles from hurdle to hurdle to propagate the fl ame. Kyle Sullivan, lead author of the article, points out “they’re two very simple architectures, but the scaling behavior is opposite
due to the fact that the mode of energy transport being controlled in each case is different.” This work has identified a number of critical geometric design parameters and validated the use of alternative 3D architectures in tailoring the dynamic behavior of reactive materials. As Sullivan explains, “Until now, most of the focus has been on reformulating to achieve a desired performance; what 3D printing brings to the table is the ability to use architecture to make better use of the formulations you already have.” Ian McDonald
could create a sensor on a textile, it would make a neat wearable keyboard and entirely circumvent the need for microfabrication. As reported in a recent issue of Advanced Materials (DOI: 10.1002/ adma.201504249), the conductive organic polymer poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene): poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS), coated with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), was used to pattern elec- Wearable stretchable keyboard based on conducting polymer trodes. An applied load electrodes on knitted textile. Credit: Advanced Materials. causes a change in the capacitance response of the device that can be measured with a microcontroller unit. such as a
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