Recent trends in smart textiles: Wearable sensors and drug release systems

Abstract

Nowadays nanotechnology can provide high durability and high performances for textile materials. In particular, the uptake of opportune functional molecules into textile fabrics is a powerful approach towards the development of engineered functional surfaces such as the so-called “smart textiles”, able for example to react and adapt to specific external environmental stimuli from their surroundings. Thanks to the large number of available sensing molecules and electronic devices, the introduction of the sensor technology in textiles can result in wearable sensors, useful for a wide range of daily life applications, such as medical and diagnostic, health care and telemedicine, fitness, sportswear and leisure, wellness, as well as military and emergency services equipment, and environmental. At the same time, in the last years there is a growing interest in textile-based drug release and delivery systems thanks to their potential innovative medical and well-being applications. In this way, the sol-gel technique or nanocomposites polymerization are promising methods exploited to better control the size and shape of the hosting nanostructured 3D network as textile coatings, and firmly bind to or include functional moieties, in order to obtain wearable sensors or controlled drug release textiles materials.