E-textiles

Cast your mind back a few years and you will find a conductive ink business that appeared very mature and slow moving. Then everything began to change...

Over the past 20 years, e-textiles have progressed from an academic curiosity to an important technology platform generating revenue for companies globally. In particular, the industry saw strong growth for several years up to 2015, with successful launches of many new products from a series of players.

A team of IDTechEx analysts attended CES 2017 in the first week of January. Our aim was to cover all of the latest updates and trends in each of the topics that we cover. In this exclusive premium article, we report our observations in the VR, AR/MR, smartwatch & fitness tracker, sensors, air quality monitoring, displays and haptics spaces.

So far, there is very little true e-textile in production - that is, textiles with electronic and/or electric functionality based on weavable e-fibers. That is now changing.

The brand new IDTechEx Research report E-Textiles: Electronic Textiles 2014-2024 External Link has a particular focus on the narrow definition of those entirely reliant on e-fibers for electronic, electro-optic and electrical functionality.