pp. 627-634
S&M956 Research Paper of Special Issue https://doi.org/10.18494/SAM.2013.920 Published: December 16, 2013 Fabric Touch Sensors Using Projected Self-Capacitive Touch Technique [PDF] Seiichi Takamatsu, Takahiro Yamashita, Takahiko Imai and Toshihiro Itoh (Received June 10, 2013; Accepted August 21, 2013) Keywords: touch sensor, projected self-capacitive touch technique, fabric, conductive polymer
We propose a touch sensor made of fabric that employs a projected self-capacitive touch technique as its sensing principle to achieve a large output signal. The touch sensor is made of fabric woven with conductive polymer-coated sensor fibers and it undergoes a change in capacitance when two sensor fibers cross under input applied pressure, which has been measured for detecting human touch. However, the change in the output capacitance of fabric touch sensors in previous studies has been small because the sensor fibers were narrow (i.e., <0.5 mm diameter) and the overlapping areas between fibers were very small. Therefore, we utilized a self-capacitive touch technique where the change in capacitance between sensor fibers and large width of human fingers (i.e., 2 cm wide) was measured to increase the overlapping areas of the capacitors on the sensor fibers. Thus, a larger change in capacitance of 2.44 pF was detected by the selfcapacitance technique that we propose, while a small change in capacitance of 0.18 pF was achieved by using methods in previous studies. We demonstrated touch sensing with a 3×3 sensor fiber array and commercially available circuits to measure capacitance. We found that this technique was well suited to capacitive touch sensors made of fabric and it should lead to various applications.
Corresponding author: Seiichi TakamatsuCite this article Seiichi Takamatsu, Takahiro Yamashita, Takahiko Imai and Toshihiro Itoh, Fabric Touch Sensors Using Projected Self-Capacitive Touch Technique, Sens. Mater., Vol. 25, No. 9, 2013, p. 627-634. |