Ti3C2Tx-MXene/PET textile-based flexible pressure sensor for wearable pulse monitoring

Abstract

The combination of flexible textiles and novel 2D conductive materials opens up new possibilities for wearable intelligent sensors, which are particularly prominent in human–computer interaction, smart e-textile, and health monitoring. However, the performance of flexible pressure sensors based on e-textiles needs to be further improved for long-term stable monitoring of weak pulse signals, such as the response time and stability. In this paper, we proposed a flexible piezoresistive sensor based on Ti₃C₂T_x-MXene/PET textile for a wearable pulse monitoring system. The textile has brilliant mechanical properties due to the unique structure of DNA-like double-helix fabrics and curved supporting fibers. The MXene nanosheets were uniformly and firmly attached to the surface of fibers by the impregnation method, forming a three-dimensional spatially conductive network. The textile-based sensor achieved high sensitivity (35 kPa⁻¹), wide response range (0–40 kPa), ultra-fast response time (15 ms), and excellent cycle stability (more than 2000 cycles). During motion monitoring, the sensor could fit closely to the skin and respond sensitively to the stress signals generated by tensile, compressive, and bending deformations. Moreover, a wearable pulse monitoring system consisting of a hardware circuit and signal processing algorithms was designed, which can capture high-quality pulse signals and automatically identify pulse signals of patients with cardiovascular disease (the accuracy reaches 98.8%). This work presents a promising route for a wearable personalized healthcare system.