Knitted for your knee – Powered by an Arduino
Powered by an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense, this knitted prototype wearable offers comfortable high-accuracy knee tracking.
Hackster.IO, the Avnet Community, reports on a knitted wearable for continual monitoring of the knee joint – from the report:
“Most existing approaches require the CF [Conductive Fabric] to be externally attached to users’ clothing or other non-conductive substrates through manual techniques like sewing or thermal welding,” the researchers explain of the issues they worked to solve “These CF sensors’ sensitivity and working range are restricted by the properties of the underlying substrate and the limited selection of commercially available CF. Moreover, CF based sensors are prone to error if misplaced from their intended location during fabrication.”
To solve that, the team stopped trying to add conductive fabric to existing garments and instead knitted the device from scratch as a single fabric — using an industrial knitting machine with computer numeric control (CNC) to vary the geometric and material properties as it’s produced. “CNC knitting machines are analogous to multi-material 3D printers as they can seamlessly integrate multiple yarns in various stitch patterns and stitch densities into a single textile of arbitrary 3D geometry,” the team explains. “This can produce a bespoke textile in a single manufacturing step that minimizes the need for post-processing methods, such as cutting or sewing.”
The material the researchers created was designed as a sensor to be worn on the knee, and in testing an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense-powered prototype proved capable of accurately tracking movements through leg extension and flexion, walking, jogging, and stair-climbing — responding to step activities in under 90 milliseconds and measuring joint angles changes as low as 0.12 degrees. This, its creators say, could prove the device’s worth for the tracking of mobility-related health conditions in everyone from athletes to the elderly — and without discomfort.
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