Wearable electronic textiles based on natural biocompatible/biodegradable materials have attracted great attention due to applications in health care and smart clothes. Silkworm fibers are durable, good heat conductors, insulating, and biocompatible, and are therefore regarded as excellent mediating materials for flexible electronics. In this paper, a strategy on the design and fabrication of highly flexible multimode electronic textiles (E-textile) based on functionalized silkworm fiber coiled yarns and weaving technology is presented. To achieve enhanced temperature sensing performance, a mixture of carbon nanotubes and an ionic liquid ([EMIM] Tf 2 N) is embedded, which displays top sensitivity of 1.23% °C −1 and stability compared with others. Furthermore, fibrous pressure sensing based on the capacitance change of each cross-point of two yarns gives rise to highly position dependent and sensitivity sensing of 0.136 kPa −1 . Based on weaving technologies, a unique combo textile sensor, which can sense temperature and pressure independently with a position precision of 1 mm 2 , is obtained. The application to intelligent gloves endows the position dependent sensing of the weight, and temperature distribution sensing of the temperature.

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) have demonstrated their promising potential in biomotion energy harvesting. A combination of the TENG and textile materials presents an effective approach toward smart fabric. However, most traditional fabric TENGs with an alternating current (AC) have to use a stiff, uncomfortable, and unfriendly rectifier bridge to obtain direct current (DC) to store and supply power for electronic devices. Here, a DC fabric TENG (DC F-TENG) with the most common plain structure is designed to harvest biomotion energy by tactfully taking advantage of the harmful and annoying electrostatic breakdown phenomenon of clothes. A small DC F-TENG (1.5 cm × 3.5 cm) can easily light up 416 serially connected light-emitting diodes. Furthermore, some yarn supercapacitors are fabricated and woven into the DC F-TENG to harvest and store energy and to power electronic devices, such as a hygrothermograph or a calculator, which shows great convenience and high efficiency in practice. This low-cost and efficient DC F-TENG which can directly generate DC energy without using the rectifier bridge by harvesting energy from unhealthy electrostatic breakdown has great potential as a lightweight, flexible, wearable, and comfortable energy-harvesting device in the future.

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A unique strategy of mesoscopic functionalization starting from silk fibroin (SF) materials to the fabrication of meso flexible SF electronic skin (e-skin) is presented. Notably, SF materials of novel and enhanced properties of the materials can be achieved by mesoscopically reconstructing the hierarchical structures of SF materials, based on rerouting the refolding process of SF molecules by meso-nucleation templating. Mesoscopic hybridization/reconstruction endows cocoon silk with a robust mechanical and electric performance by incorporating wool keratin (WK) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) into the mesostructures of SF via intermolecular templated nucleation. Furthermore, the asymmetrical meso-functional films with biocompatibility and insulation on one side and conductivity on the other (square resistance = 130 Ω sq −1 ) endow the passive wireless e-skin exhibited a tunable sensitivity from −1.05 to −6.35 kPa −1 with a lossless measurement range of ≈2 kPa. The pulses of human subjects are monitored using the e-skin to evaluate blood vessel hardening and real-time dynamic systolic and diastolic blood pressure.