Smart Textile-Based Interactive, Stretchable and Wearable Sensors for Healthcare

Abstract

Recently, the concept of mobile health (mHealth) has found surging interest due to the advancement in smart and real-time healthcare monitoring facilities. Smart textile-based nano-sensors are significantly augmenting this trend of mobile healthcare because of their enormous access and user-friendly interface to non-invasive monitoring of individual health status. Smart textiles are ideally suited for skin-conformal medical functions since they can easily come in contact with human body. Notable progress has been observed in this decade in the area of smart-textile based health monitoring systems. Smart textile based stretchable and flexible sensors are being utilized extensively in supervision of essential dynamic motion and physiological signals of a body, which can be sent to the clinician for timely treatment of the patients. This chapter highlights the enormous opportunities and progresses in the area of smart-textile based nanosensors for wearable healthcare. The first part of this chapter discusses different textile structural assemblies and nanomaterials which are commonly utilized in smart-textile based nanosensor electrodes. The next part of this chapter discusses the key advances in textile based smart nanosensors for healthcare including dynamic bio-monitoring, artificial muscles, thermotherapy, infant’s health monitoring, biosignal monitoring and many others.