Recent Advancements in Wearable & Smart Textiles: An Overview

Abstract

Abstract Smart wearable textile’ becomes a major segment of electronic-textiles (e-textiles) along with smart clothing and information science (wearable computer). Wearable textiles can sense, react and adapt themselves accordingly to external conditions or stimuli and wearable textiles can be divided into active and passive smart wearable textiles which can be work with human brain with cognition, reasoning, activating capacity. Generally, different unsaturated polymeric substrates as polyaniline, polypyrrole, polytiophene and polyacetylene are used as inherently conductive materials. Now these day single/ multiwalled-nano carbon tubes (SWCNT/MWCNT) and Ag, Cu, Au nanoparticles are used as e-textiles basic yarn materials with variable cross sectional areas (sandwiched, coated, shelled, tri-lobal or twisted forms). Their conductivity ranges can varies within 10-1-10-8-cm-1. The products are assorted with a varieties of depth as centrally controlled sensors, actuators, circuit tree added conductive stitched or embroidered fabric, planer electric yarn, data transferring devices, conductive ink printing, textile Bluetooth antenna, integrated fabric area networked clothing, EMI shielding, power supply clothing, Numetrex sports bra (Textronics), intelligence textile wears like WarmX vest, textile headband for facial EMG and knee sleeve and flex sensor or even as pressure sensor providing relief from post-medical operational health risk hazards. e-textiles can be used in military applications in detection of enemies or biochemical threats. Recently developed ‘Biodegradable Smart Shirt’ textile platform is also able to monitor vital signs and heartbeats or palpitation rates for the patient using data management based information applications. Wearable e-textile has been introduced to fashion articles, for example: ICD+ Jacket with fabricated embroidered textile keypad or improvised to Softswitch remote control and light switch and pillow covers (made by Phillips Electronics and Levi Strauss) which can perform multiple modalities of works like mobile connect, geo-navigation and MP3 players as per the consumer’s choices. This paper particularly aims to review all the latest developments of wearable e-textiles.