Smart textiles: how electronics merge into our clothing

Smart textiles are textiles with integrated sensors, data processing, communication and power units and can be regarded as a new application field for microelectronic devices. It largely benefits from a series of recent developments: sensors become smaller, more reliable and require less power and, on the other hand, energy harvesting techniques are continuously improving as well as energy storage devices as flexible batteries and super capacitors. Based on these rapid developments it is not unlikely to expect that in the near future we indeed will have textiles with an integrated battery less sensor network which will continuously monitor the health of patients, soldiers or you yourself. In this paper we show that before these e-textiles are as widely spread and accepted as our cell phones, a number of hurdles must be taken first.