E-Textile Technology Review–From Materials to Application

Abstract

Wearable devices are ideal for personalized electronic applications in several domains such as healthcare, entertainment, sports and military. Although wearable technology is a growing market, current wearable devices are predominantly battery powered accessory devices, whose form factors also preclude them from utilizing the large area of the human body for spatiotemporal sensing or energy harvesting from body movements. E-textiles provide an opportunity to expand on current wearables to enable such applications via the larger surface area offered by garments, but consumer devices have been few and far between because of the inherent challenges in replicating traditional manufacturing technologies (that have enabled these wearable accessories) on textiles. Also, the powering of e-textile devices with battery energy like in wearable accessories, has proven incompatible with textile requirements for flexibility and washing. Although current e-textile research has shown advances in materials, new processing techniques, and one-off e-textile prototype devices, the pathway to industry scale commercialization is still uncertain. This paper reports the progress on the current technologies enabling the fabrication of e-textile devices and their power supplies including textile-based energy harvesters, energy storage mechanisms, and wireless power transfer solutions. It identifies factors that limit the adoption of current reported fabrication processes and devices in the industry for mass-market commercialization. INDEX TERMSWearables, e-textile devices, e-textile power sources, e-textile manufacturing and scalability.

Woven eTextiles in HCI — a Literature Review

“…Alongside reports on individual projects and pieces discussing the same project from alternative angles, our survey identifed nine literature reviews focusing on topics adjacent to woven eTextiles. While none of the reviews provide the depth of detail on the textile structures that some other sources do, each of these articles features some examples of woven eTextiles [1,17,29,35,58,101,102,112,126]. We include them here because they go into the links to woven-eTextile-related topics and present overviews of these, but they are excluded from our detail-level analysis since they lack the required depth.…”

“…To a similar extent, two articles found [102,126] examine nanomaterials and nanotechnology, along with surrounding eforts, such as textile-integration work. Bus structures and interconnections for eTextiles have been reviewed also [1], as has the fabrication of eTextile devices and their power supplies [58]. The fnal two reviews attend more to the application level, with one focusing on the technologies enabling information-gathering garments [112] and the other considering robotics applications [29].…”

1 μW-3.75 W Dual-Mode Near/Far-Field Wearable Wireless Power Transfer using a Hybrid Rectenna

“…As flexible "e-textile" wearables continue to generate interest for a range of different applications [1], enabling batteryfree wearable devices through wireless power transfer (WPT) has been the focus of many research efforts [2]- [5]. Batteryless wearables have the advantages of a long lifetime and reduce the electronic waste generated upon their disposal.…”

Magic of 5G Technology and Optimization Methods Applied to Biomedical Devices: A Survey

“…Biomedical devices are significant tools as they can be used to diagnose, assist in delivering health care, and treat patients by providing access to the physiological data of patients [9]. These are employed for various targets such as medical imaging, bionics, and clinical engineering which use implanted devices [10]. Figure 1 illustrates one of the uses of biomedical devices as one of the active wearable sensors used for collecting the physiological data from a patient, before transferring the data to the hospital through the wireless networks.…”