This review paper presents an overview of the smart electro-clothing systems (SeCSs) targeted at health monitoring, sports benefits, fitness tracking, and social activities. Technical features of the available SeCSs, covering both textile and electronic components, are thoroughly discussed and their applications in the industry and research purposes are highlighted. In addition, it also presents the developments in the associated areas of wearable sensor systems and textile-based dry sensors. As became evident during the literature research, such a review on SeCSs covering all relevant issues has not been presented before. This paper will be particularly helpful for new generation researchers who are and will be investigating the design, development, function, and comforts of the sensor integrated clothing materials.

Lifetime of power electronic devices, in particular those used for wind turbines, is short due to the generation of thermal stresses in their switching device e.g., IGBT particularly in the case of high switching frequency. This causes premature failure of the device leading to an unreliable performance in operation. Hence, appropriate thermal assessment and implementation of associated mitigation procedure are required to put in place in order to improve the reliability of the switching device. This paper presents two case studies to demonstrate the reliability assessment of IGBT. First, a new driving strategy for operating IGBT based power inverter module is proposed to mitigate wire-bond thermal stresses. The thermal stress is characterised using finite element modelling and validated by inverter operated under different wind speeds. High-speed thermal imaging camera and dSPACE system are used for real time measurements. Reliability of switching devices is determined based on thermoelectric (electrical and/or mechanical) stresses during operations and lifetime estimation. Second, machine learning based data-driven prognostic models are developed for predicting degradation behaviour of IGBT and determining remaining useful life using degradation raw data collected from accelerated aging tests under thermal overstress condition. The durations of various phases with increasing collector-emitter voltage are determined over the device lifetime. A data set of phase durations from several IGBTs is trained to develop Neural Network (NN) and Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) models, which is used to predict remaining useful life (RUL) of IGBT. Results obtained from the presented case studies would pave the path for improving the reliability of IGBTs.

Recent advances in micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) have produced wide variety of wearable sensors. Owing to their low cost, small size and interfacability, those MEMS based devices have become increasingly commonplace and part of daily life for many people. Large amount of data from heart and breath rates to electrocardiograph (ECG) signals, which contain a wealth of health-related information, can be measured. Hence, there is a timely need for novel interrogation and analysis methods for extracting health related features from such a Big Data. In this paper, the prospects from smart clothing such as wearable devices in generating Big Data are critically analyzed with a focus on applications related to healthcare, sports and fashion. The work also covers state-of-the-art data analytics methods and frameworks for health monitoring purposes. Subsequently, a novel data analytics framework that can provide accurate decision in both normal and emergency health situations is proposed. The proposed novel framework identifies and discusses sources of Big Data from the human body, data collection, communication, data storage, data analytics and decision making using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. The paper concludes by identifying challenges facing the integration of Big Data analytics with smart clothing. Recommendation for further development opportunities and directions for future work are also suggested.

Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) has witnessed significant attention due to its potential of interconnecting massive number of heterogeneous sensor nodes to collect big data for harnessing knowledge thus enabling real time monitoring, actuation and control. The wireless sensors relay their packets on to the base station via multi-hop transmissions and the overall functioning of the system, therefore, is dependent on these intermediate nodes. However, unbalanced data forward amongst the nodes results in high-energy consumption and packets drop. The network lifetime and link reliability are the most important factors for the network to work for longer period of time, hence optimum selection of the paths for packet routing is key for prolonged network life. This paper proposes a link quality-oriented route (LQOR) protocol for scalable IoT networks. The main goal of this scheme is to balance the network load by intelligently selecting the next hop with less number of neighbouring nodes. The comparative performance evaluation corroborates the positive impact of the algorithm as compared to other related techniques existing in the literature. We show that the proposed algorithm achieves less packets loss and average number of paths, minimizing data retransmissions. This effectively improves the overall system performance and elongates the network lifetime.

This paper presents an overview of the smart electro-clothing systems (SeCSs) targeted at health monitoring, sports benefits, fitness tracking, and social activities. Technical features of the available SeCSs, covering both textile and electronic components, are thoroughly discussed and their applications in the industry and research purposes have been highlighted. In addition, it also presents the developments in the associated areas of wearable sensor systems and textile-based dry sensors. As it became evident during the literature research, such a review on SeCSs covering all relevant issues has not been presented before. This paper will be particularly helpful for new generation researchers investigating the design, development, function and comforts of the sensor integrated clothing materials.