Smart Textiles for Personalized Health Care

There is nothing more personal than healthcare. Health care should move from its current reactive and disease-centric system to a personalized, predictive, preventative, and participatory model with a focus on disease prevention and health promotion. As the world marches into the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G wireless, technology renovation enables the industry to offer a more individually tailored approach to healthcare with better health outcomes, higher quality, and lower cost. However, empowering the utility of IoT-enabled technologies for personalized health care is still significantly challenged by the shortage of cost-effective on-body biomedical devices to continuously provide real-time, patient-generated health data. Textiles have been concomitant and played a vital role in the long history of human civilization. Incorporating sensing and therapeutic capabilities into everyday textiles could be a powerful approach to the development of personalized healthcare. Merging biomedical devices and textiles becomes increasingly important owing to the growing trend of IoT since it could serve as on-body healthcare platforms with incomparable wearing comfort. In this talk, I will introduce our current research on smart textiles for biomonitoring, therapeutics, power supply, and textiles body area network for personalized health care.