A team of researchers led by Dr Nazmul Karim and Prof Sir Kostya Novoselov at The University of Manchester have developed a method to produce scalable graphene-based yarn.

Multi-functional wearable e-textiles have been a focus of much attention due to their great potential for healthcare, sportswear, fitness and aerospace applications.

Graphene has been considered a potentially good material for these types of applications due to its high conductivity, and flexibility. Every atom in graphene is exposed to its environment allowing it to sense changes in its surroundings, making it an ideal material for sensors.

Smart wearable textiles have experienced a renaissance in recent years through the innovation and miniaturisation and wireless revolution.

There has been efforts to integrate textile-based sensors into garments, however current manufacturing processes are complex and time consuming, expensive, and the materials used are non-biodegradable and use unstable metallic conductive materials.

As published in ACS Nano, the process developed by the team based at the National Graphene Institute has the potential produce tonnes of conductive graphene-based yarn, using existing textile machineries and without adding to production costs.

In addition to producing the yarn in large quantities, they are washable, flexible, inexpensive and biodegradable.

Such sensors could be integrated to either a self-powered RFID or low-powered Bluetooth to send data wirelessly to mobile device.