Wearable power supply devices and systems are important necessities for the emerging textile electronic applications. Current energy supply devices usually need more space than the device they power, and are often based on rigid and bulky materials, making them difficult to wear. Fabric-based batteries without any rigid electrical components are therefore ideal candidates to solve the problem of powering these devices. Printing technologies have greater potential in manufacturing lightweight and low-cost batteries with high areal capacity and generating high voltages which are crucial for electronic textile (e-textile) applications. In this review, we present various printing techniques, and battery chemistries applied for smart fabrics, and give a comparison between them in terms of their potential to power the next generation of electronic textiles. Series combinations of many of these printed and distributed battery cells, using electrically conducting threads, have demonstrated their ability to power different electronic devices with a specific voltage and current requirements. Therefore, the present review summarizes the chemistries and material components of several flexible and textile-based batteries, and provides an outlook for the future development of fabric-based printed batteries for wearable and electronic textile applications with enhanced level of DC voltage and current for long periods of time.
The field of wearable computing technology describes the future of electronic systems being an integral part of our everyday clothing with various enhanced functionalities. The present work is aimed at making closer steps towards the real wearability of electronics using textiles. We designed a fully-textile meander line Z–shaped monopole antenna for radio-frequency (RF) harvesting and for short-range communication purposes in the body-area network for various wearable applications. The target antenna was designed in the Ansys HFSS software tool and fabricated on a single-layer cotton textile using silver conductive threads and an embroidery technique. The antenna was characterized using a vector network analyzer (VNA), and the selected design was found to be nearly invariant under different deployment conditions. Antenna performance was studied by measuring the return loss while the antenna was in close proximity to the human body, or under various bending scenarios and/or wet conditions with sweat. The simulated return loss was −20.36 dB at an operating frequency of 1.62 GHz, and the measured return loss for the fabricated antenna was −19.45 dB at 1.6275 GHz with a −10 dB bandwidth of 100 MHz (i.e., 1.58 GHz to 1.68 GHz), and a fractional bandwidth of 6.17%. The results of this study are very important for the design of future wearable antennas in the new concept of the Internet of bodies.
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