Sensing Devices Digitize the Texture of Fabrics for Sustainable Fashion

The fashion industry, in which mass consumption and mass disposal have become problems, is considered to be an industry with an extremely large environmental impact due to the amount of energy used in manufacturing and the short life cycle of the manufactured products. Each country is aiming for “sustainable fashion” by incorporating AI and other technologies to meet demand, minimize waste, and optimize resources. Traditional fabric swatch books used for product planning are inefficient in terms of labor and real-time performance. DXing fabric swatch books are expected to eliminate the planning of products that do not sell well and reduce the amount of waste generated by dead stock. Therefore, the purpose of this research is DXing fabric softness and improvement of the device to facilitate its use. Our research demonstrates that the voltage and resistance values obtained from a pressure sensor can be analyzed by using the elasticity of the fabric to show the movement of stress when a hammering force is applied externally to the fabric. The inexpensive capacitive pressure sensor used in this research forms a capacitor by placing a fixed glass pole and a movable silicon pole in opposition and converting changes in capacitance generated by the deformation of the movable pole due to external pressure into an electrical signal. This research also succeeded in developing a user interface with which the measurement results of the Arduino receiving the signal can be confirmed with a button on a PC screen.