Accelerated lifetime tests on e-textiles: Design and fabrication of multifunctional test bench

The development of e-textiles and conductive fabrics is strongly supported by the rapid growth of wearable electronics. Unfortunately, the fast development of production technologies for smart textiles has not been followed by standard design methods and validation procedures to certificate the electro-mechanical reliability of e-textiles. Then, the design of test procedures able to control the sources of failure in combination with cross-talk effects (e.g. between load and wear, cyclic loads and current flow, etc.) is crucial. Standard tests already used for traditional fabrics are not satisfactory in pre- dicting the lifetime of e-textiles. This paper introduces the design of innovative machine to assess the performances and reliability of smart fabrics under fully controllable conditions.