E-textile technology: from materials to applications and wireless distance transfer

Abstract

Wearable technology is suitable for specific electronic applications in a variety of industries, including healthcare, entertainment, sports, and military. Although the market for wearable technology is growing, most of the present devices are battery-powered accessories, and their form factors prevent them from taking advantage of the human body's huge surface area for spatiotemporal sensing or energy harvesting from movements. However, consumer devices have been hard to come by due to the inherent difficulties in replicating traditional manufacturing technologies (that have enabled these wearable accessories) on textiles. E-textiles offers an opportunity to expand on current wearables to enable such applications via the larger surface area offered by garments. Additionally, the requirement for textiles to be flexible, and machine washable has been shown to be incompatible with the powering of e-textile devices using battery energy, like in wearable accessories. The pathway to industry-scale commercialization is still unclear, despite the fact that recent research on e-textiles has revealed improvements in materials, novel processing methods, and unique e-textile prototype devices. In addition, active E-textile devices requires a comfortable source of power to remove the batteries' use drawbacks. The distance transfer is one of the biggest challenge of this technology. This article discusses the advancements made in the technology used to create smart textiles with a big focus on the wireless power transfer techniques. It points out difficulties that prevent the industry from adopting the indicated fabrication technologies and devices for mass-market commercialization.