Curing Free, Silver Nano Ink Based Inkjet Printed Fabrics for Bio-Medical Applications

Inkjet printing plays a vital role in the fabrication of medical cloths that are worn by the patients comfortably. For the acquisition of bio-signals out of the body and to extract the parameters such as temperature, pressure, ECG signals etc conductive electrodes or sensors are used. Hence, conductive patterns or layers are needed to be placed over the body for effective acquisition of bio-signals. Recent wearable medical devices have these sensors as conductive patterns which are integrated with the textile or dress material that the patient wear. There are several methods available for the fabrication of such e-textile materials. One such method is the inkjet printing that overcomes the drawbacks of other traditional methods like dip coating, screen printing, knitting and weaving. In this work, we have fabricated an e-textile cloth by means of inkjet printing using nano silver ink and have proven the conductivity of the printed fabric by means of simple circuitry. This work also shows the comparison of fabrication methods of conductive fabrics and the materials used for the fabrication process.