Design and development of a textile sensor for synergetic muscle action measurement

This study presents a novel flexible textile sensor designed for measuring musculoskeletal joint movements, employing commonly available textiles and conductive yarns. To evaluate this sensor’s accuracy, calibration and verification are conducted using a biomedical-based electronic sensor device as a reference standard. Performance of the textile sensor involves lower limb knee joint movements, with outputs from the textile sensor compared against those from a digital goniometer and a 3-axis electronic sensor device. Results demonstrate high correlation coefficients of 0.92 and 0.93 respectively, between the waveforms of the textile sensor and the reference devices. These findings strongly suggest that the proposed sensor accurately tracks synergistic muscle joint actions during diverse physical activities performed by humans.