Bio-Inspired Hierarchical Flexible Fabric Glove Enables Low-Cost Full-Palm Tactile Sensing

Wearable tactile sensing systems have long faced a trilemma in which wide-area sensing, flexible conformability, and low-cost integration are difficult to achieve simultaneously. Inspired by the functional hierarchy of human skin, this work presents a bio-inspired flexible fabric tactile glove with a hierarchical sensing architecture that integrates pressure sensing, node addressing, and signal transmission into the textile body. An orthogonal conductive-yarn array combined with time-division-multiplexed matrix scanning forms a full-palm tactile array containing 225 addressable nodes. Under normal matrix-scanning operation, the glove exhibits system-level apparent response and recovery times of approximately 90 ms and 80 ms, respectively. A representative sensing node shows an experimentally verified minimum detectable pressure of 0.4 kPa and a monotonic pressure response over 0–400 kPa. After 6000 repeated loading cycles, the response-amplitude retention is 99.4%. The material cost of one tactile glove together with its basic readout circuitry is approximately US$5, while the fabric structure retains its flexibility, conformability, and breathability. Experiments involving dexterous-hand teleoperation, shared tactile feedback, and exoskeleton-assistance triggering further demonstrate the feasibility of using the glove as a low-cost tactile interface for human–machine interaction.