E-textiles are particular type of fabrics that have electronics and inter connections woven into them with physical flexibility and size that cannot be achieved with existing techniques of electronic manufacturing. Components and interconnections are treated as something intrinsic to the fabric or in other words the very essence of the fabric and thus are less visible and not susceptible to becoming tangled together or hitched by the surroundings.
An e-textile can be worn in everyday situations where currently available wearable computers would hinder the user. E-textiles can also more easily adapt to changes in the computational and sensing requirements of an application, a useful feature for power management and context awareness.
E-textiles are also known as smart fabric, smart yarn, or intelligent textile. This particular type of textile is believed to have a far-reaching effect on our everyday life, consumer market arena and multiple applications. This textile demands remote sensing, processing and actuation. E-textiles mainly emphasizes on creating a woven textile with the help of embedded copper wires and which will provide the usual wear and comfort and at the same time it will have a circuit with a few chips running at a few megahertz. As the scale of electronic devices shrink e-textiles will make it possible for a wide variety of novel applications which are currently unfeasible.
