Smart textiles for wearable sensor networks: Review and early lessons

Field of wearable computing has great implications for medical applications, including early detection, treatment, compliance monitoring, care for the frail and elderly, telemedicine, physical therapy and many others. Unfortunately such wearable technology solutions are still custom made and time and resource intensive to develop. In this paper the current progress of development of a universal smart textile system is discussed which would solve this problem and accelerate the field of smart wearable electronics. Such a textile must be able to accommodate several hundreds of sensors, providing power and data transmission lines in such a way, that mass production of smart garments from such a textile is feasible. The main problems and potential solutions discussed in this article include topology, allowing the textile to be arbitrarily cut and sewn into smart clothing, data transmission architecture providing high bandwidth and low energy data transfer and support for miniaturization and elasticity, making the potential end product as unobtrusive as possible.