Traditional medical sensors are foreign objects “attached” to the body, while spunbond fabric-embedded biosensors “weave” monitoring functions into the clothing itself, achieving **imperceptible, routine, and long-term** vital sign monitoring.
How are the key technologies achieved?
1. Smart Fabric Substrate: Spunbond Fabric
Characteristics: Spunbond fabric is made by directly spinning melted polymers into a web and then heat-pressing it for reinforcement. It is inherently soft, breathable, lightweight, stretchable, low-cost, and easy to mass-produce.
Advantages: As a sensor substrate, it perfectly conforms to the skin (especially irregular areas such as joints), reducing foreign body sensation and skin allergies, making it suitable for long-term wear, even during sleep.
2. “Weaving” Methods of Biosensors
Fiber-like Sensors: This is the most cutting-edge direction. Conductive polymer materials, carbon nanotubes, graphene, and other functional materials are made into spun “smart fibers.” These fibers themselves can sense pressure (capacitance changes), strain (resistance changes), temperature (resistance changes), etc. These smart fibers are then woven or embroidered into key locations on the spunbond fabric, just like ordinary yarn.
Printed/Coated Sensors: Conductive inks (such as silver nanowires, PEDOT:PSS) are used to directly “draw” circuits and sensors onto the spunbond fabric via screen printing or inkjet printing. This method is relatively mature and suitable for manufacturing electrodes (for ECG, EMG) and temperature sensors.
Hybrid Integration: Miniaturized traditional chip sensors (such as optical PPG sensors, accelerometers) are embedded in the fabric as “electronic buttons” in a flexible package. The fabric itself handles power supply and data transmission lines, while the chip serves as the core processing unit.
3. Monitored Vital Signs and Principles
ECG Signals: Multiple dry electrodes are integrated into the fabric at the chest location to capture the electrical activity of the heart.
Respiratory Rate:
Impedance Method: Electrodes in the chest or abdomen are used to measure changes in thoracic impedance caused by respiration.
Strain Sensing Method: Tensile sensors are used in the chest and abdomen to directly measure fabric deformation caused by respiration.
Blood Oxygen Saturation: Integrating tiny optical sensors (PPGs) at the fingertips, earlobes, or wrists, these sensors emit red and infrared light, calculating blood oxygen levels by detecting the intensity of transmitted or reflected light.
Body Temperature: Integrating flexible temperature sensors (such as thermistor fibers).
Activity and Posture: Integrating flexible accelerometers and gyroscopes for monitoring falls, sleep quality, and rehabilitation exercises.
Transformative Application Scenarios
Chronic Disease Management and Home Monitoring
Cardiovascular Disease Patients: Wearing a smart vest allows for 24/7 uninterrupted ECG monitoring, automatically capturing occasional, asymptomatic arrhythmias (such as atrial fibrillation), offering greater convenience and longer-term monitoring than 24-hour Holter monitoring.
Sleep Apnea Syndrome: Smart pajamas can monitor apnea events, decreased blood oxygen levels, and sleep posture, replacing some aspects of polysomnography in hospitals.
Remote Monitoring of Inpatients
Patients wear smart hospital gowns, allowing nurses at the station to view all patients’ vital signs in real time. Any abnormalities (such as rapid heart rate or respiratory depression) trigger an immediate alarm. This significantly reduces the workload of nurses during ward rounds, achieving “invisible” continuous monitoring.
Postoperative Rehabilitation and Fall Prevention in the Elderly
Postoperative Rehabilitation: Monitoring patients’ activity levels, respiration, and heart rate ensures they complete rehabilitation activities as planned, while also promptly detecting postoperative complications (such as shortness of breath caused by pulmonary embolism).
Fall Prevention in the Elderly: Smart clothing can accurately identify fall postures and immediately alert family members or emergency centers. Simultaneously, by analyzing gait, it can predict fall risk and enable early intervention.
Military and Special Occupational Health
Smart underwear is designed for soldiers, firefighters, astronauts, etc., to monitor their physiological state, fatigue levels, and stress responses in real time, ensuring their safety in extreme environments.
5. Sports Science and Healthy Individuals
Professional athletes use smart sportswear to monitor training load, muscle activation status, and recovery to optimize training plans.
Challenges and Future Prospects
Despite the promising prospects, the following challenges must be overcome to achieve large-scale commercial application:
Durability and Washability: Ensuring stable operation of sensors and circuits after repeated stretching, friction, and dozens or even hundreds of washes is the biggest engineering challenge. Solutions include developing washable encapsulation materials and self-healing conductive materials.
Signal Quality: Motion artifacts are the bane of wearable devices. Smart clothing requires more advanced algorithms to filter noise and extract pure physiological signals.
Energy Issues: How to power these sensors? Flexible batteries, energy harvesting technologies (such as utilizing body movement and thermoelectricity), and ultra-low-power chips are key research areas.
Data Security and Privacy: The continuously generated physiological data is highly sensitive privacy information, requiring strong encryption and secure data transmission protocols.
Regulatory Approval: As medical devices, they must pass rigorous approval from regulatory authorities (such as the US FDA and China’s NMPA) to prove their safety, effectiveness, and reliability.
Future Outlook
The future directions will be:
Multimodal Fusion
A single garment can simultaneously monitor multiple indicators such as ECG, respiration, body temperature, and activity, providing a more comprehensive health profile.
Closed-Loop Treatment
Beyond monitoring, intervention is also possible. For example, when a diabetic patient’s blood sugar is detected to be too low, glucagon can be automatically released via microneedles.
AI-Driven
Combining artificial intelligence with in-depth analysis of long-term monitoring big data enables early disease warnings and personalized health management recommendations.
Conclusion
“When textiles meet medicine,” spunbond fabrics embedded with biosensors transform cold medical devices into warm, seamlessly integrated partners in our daily lives. It represents a paradigm shift in medical technology, moving from in-hospital treatment to out-of-hospital prevention and comprehensive management. With the continuous advancement of materials science, microelectronics, and artificial intelligence, the clothing we wear will become our most intimate and reliable “health guardian.”
Dongguan Liansheng Non woven Technology Co., Ltd. was established in May 2020. It is a large-scale non-woven fabric production enterprise integrating research and development, production, and sales. It can produce various colors of PP spunbond non-woven fabrics with a width of less than 3.2 meters from 9 grams to 300 grams.
Post time: Nov-09-2025