Abstract：The emerging wearable electronics require a kind of fiberbased flexible and stretchable sensing elements. It is studied for the capability of conductive woven stretch fabric in sensing human upper limb motion behavior as well as its sensing mechanism. This article proposed three types of polypyrrole (PPy)-coated woven fabrics by in-situ polymerization, i.e. C/SP plain fabric, C/SP twill fabric and T/SP plain fabric. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used to observe the distribution of polypyrrole on fabric as well as fibers. Each of three PPy-coated fabrics was considered as the sensing element to test the quasistatic bending and rotation motion. From the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) of the fabric after polymerization, it can be seen that the PPy was not only adsorbed on the surface of the fabric but on the every fiber inside of the fabric, which represented the resistance against mechanical abrasion. The results of the quasistatic test showed that all of the three fabrics can reflect the human limb motion, and the change of their resistances had no observable difference. And then, the C/SP plain fabric was taken an example to test the realtime bending motion of limb motion. The results of the realtime test showed the PPy-coated woven fabrics can reflect realtime motion amplitude and numbers of the motion. It is concluded that the directional differences of the resistance of the PPy-coated woven fabrics can reflect the bending and rotatory movement of the human upper limbs.
