Conductive textiles are fabrics that include conductive yarns woven into or conductive tracks printed on to the textiles. Conductive textiles have attracted significant attention, since they are fundamental for the integration of electronic functions to achieve wearable devices. Screen printing is a well-established and cost-effective fabrication method; it enables a versatile layout of conductive tracks. The limitation of the current screen-printed conductive textiles is low durability to weathering, abrasion and washing. This paper presents a process for producing a waterproof and durable conductive textile using only screen printing. A three functional layer design was used to fabricate the durable conductive tracks. Firstly, an interface layer was printed to provide a smooth surface for subsequent printing, under-side protection and electrical insulation. Next, a silver layer provided the conductive track and finally an encapsulation layer was printed on top to provide upper-side protection and electrical insulation. The printed silver tracks achieved maximum conductivity using a single print. The conductivity of the silver tracks returned to its original value when they were dried after soaking in water continuously for 24 hours.

Practical wearable e‐textiles must be durable and retain, as far as possible, the textile properties such as drape, feel, lightweight, breathability, and washability that make fabrics suitable for clothing. Early e‐textile garments were realized by inserting standard portable electronic devices into bespoke pockets and arranging interconnects and cabling across the garment. In these examples, the textile merely served as a vehicle to house the electronics and had no inherent electronic functionality. A reduction in electronic component size, the development of flexible circuits, and the ability to weave robust interconnects offer the potential for improved levels of electronic integration within the textile. The weaving of electronic circuit filaments less than 2 mm wide into fabrics such that the electronics are fully concealed in the textile and given extra protection by the surrounding textile fibers is introduced. The failure mechanisms for different filament circuit designs before and after integration into the textile are investigated with a 90° cyclical bending test. Results show that encapsulated filament circuits embedded within the textile survive 45 washing cycles and more than 1500 cycles of 90° bending around a bending radius of 10 mm, performing five times better than equivalent filament circuits before integration into the fabric.

This paper presents research into a user-friendly electronic sleeve (e-sleeve) with integrated electrodes in an array for wearable healthcare. The electrode array was directly printed onto an everyday clothing fabric using screen printing. The fabric properties and designed structures of the e-sleeve were assessed and refined through interaction with end users. Different electrode array layouts were fabricated to optimize the user experience in terms of comfort, effectivity and ease of use. The e-sleeve uses dry electrodes to facilitate ease of use and the electrode array can survive bending a sufficient number of times to ensure an acceptable usage lifetime. Different cleaning methods (washing and wiping) have been identified to enable reuse of the e-sleeve after contamination during use. The application of the e-sleeve has been demonstrated via muscle stimulation on the upper limb to achieve functional tasks (e.g., hand opening, pointing) for eight stroke survivors.

This paper details the design, fabrication and testing of flexible textile-concealed Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags for wearable applications in a smart city/smart building environment. The proposed tag designs aim to reduce the overall footprint, enabling textile integration whilst maintaining the read range. The proposed RFID filament is less than 3.5 mm in width and 100 mm in length. The tag is based on an electrically small (0.0033 ${\lambda }^2$ ) high-impedance planar dipole antenna with a tuning loop, maintaining a reflection coefficient less than −21 dB at 915 MHz, when matched to a commercial RFID chip mounted alongside the antenna. The antenna strip and the RFID chip are then encapsulated and integrated in a standard woven textile for wearable applications. The flexible antenna filament demonstrates a 1.8 dBi gain which shows a close agreement with the analytically calculated and numerically simulated gains. The range of the fabricated tags has been measured and a maximum read range of 8.2 m was recorded at 868 MHz Moreover, the tag’s maximum calculated range at 915 MHz is 18 m, which is much longer than the commercially available laundry tags of larger length and width, such as Invengo RFID tags. The reliability of the proposed RFID tags has been investigated using a series of tests replicating textile-based use case scenarios which demonstrates its suitability for practical deployment. Washing tests have shown that the textile-integrated encapsulated tags can be read after over 32 washing cycles, and that multiple tags can be read simultaneously while being washed.