Active smart textiles hold great promise for the future of wearable technology, offering physical monitoring, communication integration, and novel ways of user input that is convenient for the wearer. Flexible Hybrid Electronics (FHE) is a technology that can enable these advancements by meeting the need for high-performance edge processing while also offering the flexibility required for mechanically dynamic environments.
NextFlex is spearheading an effort together with member institutions and partners to address the challenges associated with integrating flexible electronics into textiles, resulting in new solutions and a variety of applications.
In this presentation, we will discuss the challenges we have faced, our strategies for overcoming them, and the progress we have made in bringing flexible hybrid electronics to the textile industry. Several prototypes will be discussed that have served as feasibility vehicles. In particular, a Capacitive Touch Sensor (CTS) from our partners from Drexel University, utilizing a flexible microcontroller to perform real-time ML inference of gestures.
