Effect of Fabric Integration on the Physical and Optical Performance of Electroluminescent Fibers for Lighted Textile Applications

Light-Emitting Textiles: Device Architectures, Working Principles, and Applications

E-textiles represent an emerging technology aiming toward the development of fabric with augmented functionalities, enabling the integration of displays, sensors, and other electronic components into textiles. Healthcare, protective clothing, fashion, and sports are a few examples application areas of e-textiles. Light-emitting textiles can have different applications: sensing, fashion, visual communication, light therapy, etc. Light emission can be integrated with textiles in different ways: fabricating light-emitting fibers and planar light-emitting textiles or employing side-emitting polymer optical fibers (POFs) coupled with light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Different kinds of technology have been investigated: alternating current electroluminescent devices (ACELs), inorganic and organic LEDs, and light-emitting electrochemical cells (LECs). The different device working principles and architectures are discussed in this review, highlighting the most relevant aspects and the possible approaches for their integration with textiles. Regarding POFs, the methodology to obtain side emissions and the critical aspects for their integration into textiles are discussed in this review. The main applications of light-emitting fabrics are illustrated, demonstrating that LEDs, alone or coupled with POFs, represent the most robust technology. On the other hand, OLEDs (Organic LEDs) are very promising for the future of light-emitting fabrics, but some issues still need to be addressed.

Electronic-components less fully textile multiple resonant combiners for body-centric near field communication

Smart and e-textiles have nowadays an important increasing place in the garment industry. The rise of embedded telecommunications, especially smartphones in our pocket, enables us to provide a power source and a wireless link for smart textiles. The main issue is to develop garments able to receive power from smartphones and communicate with them without flexibility and comfort constraints bound to embedded solid-state electronic components. Consequently, this article aims to develop a fully textile NFC combiner to transfer data and power between a smartphone and sensors without any electronic components. It precisely describes textile NFC multiple combiners composed of textile NFC antennas linked by two-wire transmission lines. Also, theoretical analysis, simulations, and experiments have been conducted to adapt the resonant frequency of such structures to the NFC technology (13.56 MHz). Finally, our article generalizes textile NFC combiner resonant frequency equations for multiple combiners with any number of antennas.