Electronic Textiles: A Review

Abstract

In recent years, electronic textiles are growing, and light textile materials have started to replace heavy weight metallic materials. The conversion from traditional electronics into wearable electronics has acquired a significant interest owing to the improvement in material science. Furthermore, electronic textiles have attracted attention because of various applications in electromagnetic shielding effect, biomedical devices, energy conversion and storage. Electronic textiles can be defined as textile material having electrical properties. Electrical properties can be gained to textile materials with a variety of techniques such as chemical metallization, utilization of electrical conductive substrates in the polymer before fiber extrusion, weaving metallic wires into fabric, impregnation of conductive polymers to textile materials, and coating of conductive polymers to textile materials. In this study, wearable electronic textiles and production methods were investigated.