UART for Wearables (U4We): DC Power and Carrierless Signal Transfer over Conductive Textiles
2026-08-03 • Human-Computer Interaction
Human-Computer Interaction
AI summaryⓘ
The authors present a new way to connect battery-free wearable devices using special fabric layers that carry both power and data signals together. They use two conductive textile layers separated by an insulator to send electricity and digital pulses without needing separate wires for each device. By studying the fabric as an electrical circuit, they found formulas to help design systems that can send data at high speeds and recover signals reliably. This work provides guidelines for making wearable fabrics that handle power and communication at the same time.
conductive textilesbatteryless wearablesUARTAC couplingtransmission linepulse data signalscomparatorsecond-order circuitinductor design
Authors
Akihito Noda
Abstract
This brief presents a conductive-textile interconnection scheme for batteryless distributed wearable modules. Two conductive textile layers separated by an insulating fabric layer are used as a transmission line that simultaneously conveys DC power and pulse-based data signals without point-to-point wiring. To minimize the circuit overhead of each module, universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART) pulses are directly coupled onto the textile through AC-coupling capacitors without carrier modulation. The textile waveform is modeled as the transient response of a second-order circuit, and design conditions for comparator-based waveform recovery and high-bitrate transmission are analytically derived. The resulting design framework determines whether a given combination of data rate, textile capacitance and resistance is feasible, and also provides the corresponding design range of the decoupling inductors. These results establish a basic methodology for textile-based simultaneous power and data transfer.