Design and development of wearable sensing nanomaterials for smart textiles

Recently, textiles have been entering in a next-generation of materials able to interact with their surroundings, through the incorporation of electronic devices with various functionalities for the human body, such as batteries, displays, sensors. In these aspects, smart textiles seem to be a highly suitable possibility, due to the advantages of textiles, nanotechnology and electronics. In fact, textiles usually show strength and hardness but also ductility and flexibility, so that they can be easily manipulated and adapted to a wide range of end-use requirements. Moreover, nanotechnology exhibits significantly improved physical and chemical functionalities and properties due to their nanoscaled size. Furthermore, miniaturized circuits result to be extremely low-power with respect to other commercial solutions and they are thus suitable for portable applications. These systems, comprising small physiological sensors, transmission modules and processing capabilities, can turn out useful for real-time health status monitoring. In this paper, the recently reported and significantly developed smart textiles are summarized, including their enhanced optoelectronic al and conductivity properties.