Previous designs of fabric-based touch sensors employ a large number of sensing electrodes to form a dense XY grid, which is impractical for many situations and increases the complexity and cost of all such sensors. This is because such sensor requires a correspondingly large number of connectors to connect each electrode to the signal processing circuit.

To reduce this complexity, Drexel’s engineers and designers have developed a fully knitted, two-dimensional fabric-based touch sensor with only two electrodes – the two ends of a single conducting fiber or wire traversing the entire area of the sensor. Drexel’s touch sensor can sense both planar touch and its XY coordinates, and can also sense pressure of the touch. The sensor is easily manufactured as a single piece utilizing flatbed knitting techniques. The knitted structure requires no embedded electronic or solid components in the fabric, which allows the sensor to be flexible and resilient. The system also includes the proprietary circuit design and signal processing algorithms for controlling the sensor.

Such simplified design makes the knitted sensor ideal for applications with limited space/complexity for wiring. Other advantages of the sensor over previous methods of touch localization include scalability over a large area and efficiency in both the use of wire connections and sensing material.

This sensor has myriad of applications, including robotics and human-machine interaction, smart garments and wearables, as well as medical textiles and flexible embedded sensors. The sensor can detect the continuous planar location and contact pressure of human touch along the surface of the structure.