Review and Reappraisal of Smart Clothing

Abstract

Smart clothing is a “smart system” capable of sensing and communicating with environmental and the wearer's conditions and stimuli. A comprehensive review is presented on the research and developments related to smart clothing including technology developments, human aspects in smart clothing, and the applications. Recent smart clothing technology can be summarized as a tendency toward textile-based technology for each component: interface, communication, data management, energy management, and integrated circuits. Human aspects in smart clothing, even though some areas were not fully covered, were dealt with in terms of usability, functionality, durability, safety, comfort, and fashion. General applications of smart clothing developed so far include bio-monitoring clothing, MP3 player-adopted clothing, and photonic clothing.