Smart Textiles for Personalized Healthcare

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 wearable biomedical devices to continuously provide real-time, patient-generated health data. Textiles have been concomitant and playing a vital role in the long history of human civilization. The textile forms endow biomedical devices with biocompatible, biodegradable, even bioabsorbable features, allowing them to serve as on-body healthcare platforms with incomparable wearing comfort. Merging biomedical devices and textiles becomes increasingly important owing to the growing trend of IoT. In this talk, I will introduce our current research on smart textiles for biomedical monitoring and personalized diagnosis, textile for therapy, and textile power generation as an energy solution for future wearable medical devices.