Green Nanomaterials for Smart Textiles Dedicated to Environmental and Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Smart textiles recently reaped significant attention owing to their potential applications in various fields, such as environmental and biomedical monitoring. Integrating green nanomaterials into smart textiles can enhance their functionality and sustainability. This review will outline recent advancements in smart textiles incorporating green nanomaterials for environmental and biomedical applications. The article highlights green nanomaterials’ synthesis, characterization, and applications in smart textile development. We discuss the challenges and limitations of using green nanomaterials in smart textiles and future perspectives for developing environmentally friendly and biocompatible smart textiles.

The role of optical fiber sensors in the new generation of healthcare devices: a review

“…Additionally, smart textiles have the potential to provide doctors with a complete picture of physiological responses, motivate people to take more active roles in their healthcare, assist in exercise, and record progress. 221–226…”

Smart Textiles: A Review and Bibliometric Mapping

“…Due to the vast area of smart textiles, only a few publications provided reviews on the entire field of smart textiles [17]. Most reviews have been limited to certain aspects of smart textiles, e.g., on production methods [18][19][20], applications [20,21] of specific materials, such as nanomaterials [9,10,22,23], fibre optics [24], piezofibres [25], actuator materials [26,27], phase change materials (PCMs) [28], Ti 3 C 2 T x -based MXenes [7], and perovskite materials [29], used specifically in smart textiles. Other review articles have been devoted to selected application areas of smart textiles.…”

“…De-la-Fuente-Robles et al [54] studied wearable technologies for healthcare and performed a bibliometric analysis and mapping of 600 original articles and reviews from the Scopus database using the VOSviewer tool. Popescu and Ungureanu [23] reviewed green nanomaterials for smart textiles dedicated to environmental and biomedical applications and used VOSviewer to present a map of data extracted from the Web of Science database. Tian et al [55] performed knowledge mapping of protective clothing research over the last 20 years on 1735 articles from the Web of Science using the visualisation software CiteSpace combined with Google Earth.…”

“…First, it addresses the issue of sustainability in the production, recycling, and waste treatment of smart textile products. The sustainability of smart textiles depends on the choice of materials used, the manufacturing processes, and the end-of-life options for the textiles [23]. Researchers are exploring new sustainable and environmentally friendly materials, green manufacturing methods, end-of-the-life processes, and standardized sustainability assessment methods, such as life cycle analysis, recyclability, and biodegradability [23,161,162].…”

“…The sustainability of smart textiles depends on the choice of materials used, the manufacturing processes, and the end-of-life options for the textiles [23]. Researchers are exploring new sustainable and environmentally friendly materials, green manufacturing methods, end-of-the-life processes, and standardized sustainability assessment methods, such as life cycle analysis, recyclability, and biodegradability [23,161,162]. Second, numerous positive contributions of smart textiles to sustainability are highlighted in the following areas [163]: environmental monitoring (temperature and humidity sensors, gas sensors) [164][165][166]; fresh water purification and harvesting (filtering, mist collection, collection by coalescence or mechanical squeezing) [167][168][169]; personal protection (warming, cooling, electromagnetic protection, EMI shielding, protection against UV radiation, toxic substances and microorganisms) [35,37,138,[170][171][172][173]; power supply on the body with energy harvesting and storage (triboelectric nanogenerators [174][175][176][177][178][179][180], including thermoelectric generators [134,181,182], photovoltaic textiles [183][184][185], bio-physicochemical energy harvesting [186], textiles with perovskite solar cells and other perovskite materials [187,188], dry batteries and flexible electrodes [189][190]…”