E-textiles

The report identifies three distinct generations of textile wearable technologies: Future applications for e-textiles may be developed for sports and well-being products, and medical devices for patient monitoring.

[4][5] For example, in the late 1800s, a person could hire young women adorned in light-studded evening gowns from the Electric Girl Lighting Company to provide cocktail party entertainment.

[6] In 1968, the Museum of Contemporary Craft in New York City held a ground-breaking exhibition called Body Covering that focused on the relationship between technology and apparel.

The show featured astronauts' space suits along with clothing that could inflate and deflate, light up, and heat and cool itself.

[7] Particularly noteworthy in this collection was the work of Diana Dew,[8] a designer who created a line of electronic fashion, including electroluminescent party dresses and belts that could sound alarm sirens.

Additional smart fabric technologies were unveiled by Wainwright at two Flextech Flexible Display conferences held in Phoenix, AZ, showing infrared digital displays machine-embedded into fabrics for IFF (Identification of Friend or Foe) which were submitted to BAE Systems for evaluation in 2006 and won an "Honorable Mention" award from NASA in 2010 on their Tech Briefs, "Design the Future" contest.

He was requested to demonstrate his fabric creations that change color using any smartphone, indicate callers on mobile phones without a digital display, and contain WIFI security features that protect purses and personal items from theft.

In the mid-1990s a team of MIT researchers led by Steve Mann, Thad Starner, and Sandy Pentland began to develop what they termed wearable computers.

In response to technical, social, and design challenges faced by these researchers, another group at MIT, which included Maggie Orth and Rehmi Post, began to explore how such devices might be more gracefully integrated into clothing and other soft substrates.

[19] Smart textile fabric can be made from materials ranging from traditional cotton, polyester, and nylon, to advanced Kevlar with integrated functionalities.

It has shown that weaving can be used to incorporate electrically conductive yarn into a fabric to obtain a textile that can be used as a "Wearable Motherboard".