ABSTRACT
Portable electronics have evolved rapidly over the last 10 years and now wearable technologies are following the same trend. While multifunctional clothes are appearing on the market with a multitude of electronic devices incorporated onto the fabric, garment devices are articles of clothing with inherent electronic properties. Garment devices are the actual device, a new kind of technology, also referred to as e-textiles or smart garments (Quinn, 2010; Seymour, 2008, 2010). Cutting edge research on garment and textile devices (Figure 24.1), ranging from sensing, illuminating, and computer-like garments, continues to appear in the literature, and this chapter explores how these devices could be powered. New techniques for integrating energy storage (i.e., batteries and capacitors [Simon and Gogotsi, 2008]) into textiles are described and new methods for generating energy are briey explored. Figure 24.1 illustrates the concept of a garment device incorporating various electronic components by custom designing a knitted textile using conductive materials (Dion, 2013; Kirsch et al., 2009; Sim et al., 2012).
