ABSTRACT
Textiles are the most versatile materials found today with respect to their ease of fabrication, the design to which they can be engineered, their conventional and emerging applications, and their flexibility, lightweight, and low cost. Smart textiles are an entirely new class of fibers, fabrics, and the various products made from them. It is also important to note that the advent of smart textiles with various characteristics in a single material or those that produce a composite and hybrid structure using a range of new classes of materials has brought various disciplines of the engineering sciences together. Broadly, the different parameters that can be sensed by smart textiles are thermal, mechanical, chemical, electrical, magnetic, and optical. There are various methods of imparting the necessary electrical conductivity to textile materials, all of them are different in nature and produce materials with different levels of conductivity and stability of the coated material.
