Cylinder-shaped thermal inertial force sensor for wearable fabric sensor systems

Abstract

We previously proposed an artificial hollow fiber for use as a MEMS material and developed a fabric tactile sensor for creating a wearable sensor system. To precisely monitor the behavior of objects-for example a human, a farm animal, or a humanoid robot-in the near future, we developed a cylinder-shaped inertial force sensor to act as a sensing function in our intelligent wearable sensor system. The sensor, which is comprised of a heater and two temperature sensors, was fabricated on polyimide film by MEMS technology and placed inside a flexible hollow tube. The sensor output changed according to the inclination angle in the static operation mode. It also linearly increased with the increase of applied acceleration at frequency of 20 Hz. The proposed sensor exhibited quite small cross-sensitivity, and we confirmed that it can detect the direction of the applied inertial force by using the two orthogonally oriented sensors.