Abstract
Wearable electronics is a rapidly growing field that recently started to introduce successful commercial products into the consumer electronics market. Employment of biopotential signals in wearable systems as either biofeedbacks or control commands are expected to revolutionize many technologies including point of care health monitoring systems, rehabilitation devices, human–computer/machine interfaces (HCI/HMIs), and brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). Since electrodes are regarded as a decisive part of such products, they have been studied for almost a decade now, resulting in the emergence of textile electrodes. This study presents a systematic review of wearable textile electrodes in physiological signal monitoring, with discussions on the manufacturing of conductive textiles, metrics to assess their performance as electrodes, and an investigation of their application in the acquisition of critical biopotential signals for routine monitoring, assessment, and exploitation of cardiac (electrocardiography, ECG), neural (electroencephalography, EEG), muscular (electromyography, EMG), and ocular (electrooculography, EOG) functions.
Highlights
A new trend in electronics is towards the miniaturization and integration of devices into wearable formats such as smart watches, garments, and goggles, where the technology is collectively referred to as wearable electronics or wearable computing [1]
While the materials and methods to realize conductive textiles do not directly affect the performance of the textile electrode, they are among the most important, if not the primary, aspects of e-textile technology since manufacturing cost and reliability tend to be a direct function of the manufacturing technology
Used conductive materials include metals, conductive polymers, and carbon allotropes. These materials can be used either with mainstream fabric manufacturing/decoration approaches [20], or can be applied onto finished textiles with various techniques like electroplating [21,22], physical vapor deposition (PVD) [23,24], chemical polymerization [25], dip-coating [26], and printing methods [27] to coat the surface of the textile (Figure 1)
Summary
A new trend in electronics is towards the miniaturization and integration of devices into wearable formats such as smart watches, garments, and goggles, where the technology is collectively referred to as wearable electronics or wearable computing [1]. Wet electrodes are standard in clinical environments, gel-free, “dry” electrodes can serve as good candidates for wearable, long-term, point-of-care personal health monitoring applications and many other similar systems To this end, wearable conductive textiles provide a viable alternative. Wearable conductive textiles provide a viable alternative It is the aim of this study to survey and critically review the state-of-art wearable textile technologies, with a specific focus on the acquisition of biopotentials including cardiac, neural, muscular, and ocular signals, and to discuss some of the emerging applications enabled by their detection and processing. The challenges from fundamental material development to high-level integration are emphasized to highlight areas that need development and suggest future directions
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