Screen printing creates durable circuits for fabric wearables

This is the claim of a team led by researchers at Washington State University who believe this form of wearable electronics can be used for health monitoring in hospitals or at home. Their results have been published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.

“We wanted to make flexible, wearable electronics in a way that is much easier, more convenient and lower cost,” said corresponding author Jong-Hoon Kim, associate professor at the WSU Vancouver’s School of Engineering and Computer Science. “That’s why we focused on screen printing: it's easy to use. It has a simple setup, and it is suitable for mass production.”

Current commercial manufacturing of wearable electronics requires expensive processes involving clean rooms. While some use screen printing for parts of the process, this new method relies entirely on screen printing, which has advantages for manufacturers and consumers alike.

In the study, Kim and his colleagues detail the electrode screen-printing process and demonstrate how the resulting electrodes can be used for electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring.