Incorporating passive radiative cooling structures into personal thermal management technologies could effectively defend human against the intensifying global climate change. We show that large scale woven metafabrics can provide high emissivity (94.5%) in the atmospheric window and reflectivity (92.4%) in the solar spectrum because the hierarchical-morphology design of the randomly dispersed scatterers throughout the metafabric. Through scalable industrial textile manufacturing routes, our metafabrics exhibit excellent mechanical strength, waterproofness, and breathability for commercial clothing while maintaining efficient radiative cooling ability. Practical application tests demonstrated the human body covered by our metafabric could be cooled down ~4.8°C lower than that covered by commercial cotton fabric. The cost-effectiveness and high-performance of our metafabrics present great advantages for intelligent garments, smart textiles, and passive radiative cooling applications.
Integrating personal thermoregulation technologies into wearable textiles has enabled extensive and profound technological breakthroughs in energy savings, thermal comfort, wearable electronics, intelligent fabrics, and so forth. Nevertheless, previous studies have suffered from long-standing issues such as limited working temperature, poor comfort, and weak reliability of the textiles. Here, we demonstrate a skin-friendly personal insulation textile and a thermoregulation textile that can perform both passive heating and cooling using the same piece of textile with zero energy input. The insulation textile material is composed of biomaterial microstructured fibers that exhibit good thermal insulation, low thermal emissivity, and good dyeability. By filling these microstructure fibers with biocompatible phase-change materials and coating them with polydimethylsiloxane, the insulation textile becomes a thermoregulation textile that shows good water hydrophobicity, high mechanical robustness, and high working stability. The proposed thermoregulation textile exhibits slow heating/cooling rates with improved thermal comfort, offering feasible and adaptive options for personal cooling/heating scenarios and enabling scalable manufacturing for practical applications.
The application of wearable devices is promoting the development toward digitization and intelligence in the field of health. However, the current smart devices centered on human health have disadvantages such as weak perception, high interference degree, and unfriendly interaction. Here, an intelligent health agent based on multifunctional fibers, with the characteristics of autonomy, activeness, intelligence, and perceptibility enabling health services, is proposed. According to the requirements for healthcare in the medical field and daily life, four major aspects driven by intelligent agents, including health monitoring, therapy, protection, and minimally invasive surgery, are summarized from the perspectives of materials science, medicine, and computer science. The function of intelligent health agents is realized through multifunctional fibers as sensing units and artificial intelligence technology as a cognitive engine. The structure, characteristics, and performance of fibers and analysis systems and algorithms are reviewed, while discussing future challenges and opportunities in healthcare and medicine. Finally, based on the above four aspects, future scenarios related to health protection of a person's life are presented. Intelligent health agents will have the potential to accelerate the realization of precision medicine and active health.
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