Current Advancements and Future Perspectives in Electronic Materials for Developing Smart Clothing

Abstract

Wearable technologies have created major influence on people’s way of modern life by monitoring health condition. Smart clothing with the integration of wearable technology provides a sense of balance among fashion, engineering, and design and science to mitigate anticipated needs and desires by ensuring safe and secure human life. Wearable electronic materials are continuously being developed driven by the emerging innovations in sensor materials, textile materials, nanotechnology and diverse fabrication techniques. Recently, the combination of textile and wearable electronics materials and Internet-of-Things (IoT) is empowering the flawless conjunction of sensors into textiles (E-textile) leading to the development of health diagnosis and prognosis. In this paper, the current development of textile materials, sensor materials and their integration techniques to manufacture smart clothing are presented. The challenges in sensor integration and fabrication of smart clothing are also critically discussed for developing future generation smart clothing.