In the era of the Internet of things (IoT), textiles that surround us in daily life can create a functional interface that facilitates connectivity. The project focuses on exploring a new tangible interface for the IoT network and tackles one of the critical components, the antennas, in wireless communication. Textiles, including electronic components, are about to face tremendous environmental and resource challenges due to the complexity of sorting, the risk to supplies and metal contamination in textile recycling streams. Besides, meeting the requirement for textiles to exhibit qualities of drapability, touch, lightness and washability when combined with metals, creates new challenges in making the textiles wearable. Proposing invisibly and unobtrusively electronic integration of these components into wearables became essential especially while designing for the young children and elderly people mainly with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia due to their preferences for haptic interaction and lacking control on some external devices such as tracking devices, and other communication tools. Not limited to wearables, textiles can offer a new communication interface that promises tangible hidden connectivity in the context of tracking and monitoring of vulnerable children either in outdoor/indoor settings, and elderly and people with disabilities to provide services in public spaces and transportation, architectural spaces for anonymously tracking patients for disease spreading, and many more.
We attempted to create a graphene-based communicating piece of cloth that grounded in textile making knowledge, electronics and material science. Different antennas for ultra-wideband communication that benefits from graphene assemblies as the radiating element such as graphene fibres, chemical vapour deposition (CVD) grown multi-layer (ML) graphene sheets on the textile surfaces and as a reference graphene-based inks were designed. The promised textile-based antennas covered a wide bandwidth ranging from 3 GHz to 9 GHz, which is a promising solution for a high data rate and efficient communication link. We highlighted the textile requirements that we can positively contribute to the wearing comfort and sustainability of e-textiles when offering technological communication solutions. Also, several issues associated with being worn on the body and the effects of bending and proximity to the human body on the antenna’s overall performance were investigated.
