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In this article, it is shown how a smartphone can be used together with an e-textile structure, such as smart clothing, or any other smart home textile structure, smart composite, etc, to power it and to send and receive data generated by the e-textile by using the magnetic induction phenomenon through textile materials. This has been achieved using the NFC communication protocol and NFC compatible fully textile antennas without any electronic components such as resistors, inductors or capacitors. Our NFC antennas have been realized by embroidery and geometrical shapes using conductive threads. All the antennas realized have been tested to show their capacity to send the power and to send and receive data from sensors, in particular by testing their resonant frequencies, which are 13.7 MHz and 13.83 MHz, and their quality factor, which are 45 and 55, respectively. The approach used in this work facilitates the design and production of smart textiles and their reliability and washability, as they do not need any more to be equipped with power supplies such as batteries and data acquisition and interface cards, that are not laundering and cleaning friendly and are very difficult to be realized on flexible structures making them textile compatible. Therefore, we believe that in the future, a smartphone placed in specific locations in our clothing (pockets) equipped with our antennas will help the development and the market readiness of future generations of smart textile structures. The realized prototypes will enable to create a sensor network by acting as a current extension transmitting power and data.

Smart and e-textiles have nowadays an important increasing place in the garment industry. The rise of embedded telecommunications, especially smartphones in our pocket, enables us to provide a power source and a wireless link for smart textiles. The main issue is to develop garments able to receive power from smartphones and communicate with them without flexibility and comfort constraints bound to embedded solid-state electronic components. Consequently, this article aims to develop a fully textile NFC combiner to transfer data and power between a smartphone and sensors without any electronic components. It precisely describes textile NFC multiple combiners composed of textile NFC antennas linked by two-wire transmission lines. Also, theoretical analysis, simulations, and experiments have been conducted to adapt the resonant frequency of such structures to the NFC technology (13.56 MHz). Finally, our article generalizes textile NFC combiner resonant frequency equations for multiple combiners with any number of antennas.

After a brief description of the theoretical approach to compute the field radiated by a leaky coaxial cable, examples are given to point out the influence of the tunnel walls on the electric field variation along the cable. The time domain response is then described together with experimental results.

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