Wearable devices are ideal for personalized electronic applications in several domains such as healthcare, entertainment, sports and military. Although wearable technology is a growing market, current wearable devices are predominantly battery powered accessory devices, whose form factors also preclude them from utilizing the large area of the human body for spatiotemporal sensing or energy harvesting from body movements. E-textiles provide an opportunity to expand on current wearables to enable such applications via the larger surface area offered by garments, but consumer devices have been few and far between because of the inherent challenges in replicating traditional manufacturing technologies (that have enabled these wearable accessories) on textiles. Also, the powering of e-textile devices with battery energy like in wearable accessories, has proven incompatible with textile requirements for flexibility and washing. Although current e-textile research has shown advances in materials, new processing techniques, and one-off e-textile prototype devices, the pathway to industry scale commercialization is still uncertain. This paper reports the progress on the current technologies enabling the fabrication of e-textile devices and their power supplies including textile-based energy harvesters, energy storage mechanisms, and wireless power transfer solutions. It identifies factors that limit the adoption of current reported fabrication processes and devices in the industry for mass-market commercialization.

A novel use of spray-coating technique to fabricate organic solar cells on textiles for wearable energy harvesting applications.

Previously, textile dye sensitised solar cells (DSSCs) woven using photovoltaic (PV) yarns have been demonstrated but there are challenges in their implementation arising from the mechanical forces in the weaving process, evaporation of the liquid electrolyte and partially shaded cells area, which all reduce the performance of the cell. To overcome these problems, this paper proposes a novel fabrication process for a monolithic-structured solid-state dye sensitized solar cell (ssDSSC) on textile using all solution based processes. A glass fibre textile substrate was used as the target substrate for the printed ssDSSC that contain multiple layers of electrodes and active materials. The printed ssDSSC on textile have been successfully demonstrated and compared with a reference device made with the same processes on a glass substrate. All PV textile devices were characterized under simulated AM 1.5 conditions and a peak efficiency of 0.4% was achieved. This approach is potentially suitable for the low cost integration of PV devices onto high temperature textiles, but to widen the range of applications future research is required to reduce the processing temperature to enable the device to be fabricated on the standard fabric substrates.