Jiyong Hu

With the rapid development of wearable body-centric wireless systems, there is a growing demand for textile antennas with stable on-body performance, low profile, flexibility, and garment compatibility. Textile metamaterials provide an effective approach to address the limitations of conventional textile antennas by regulating antenna–body coupling, backward radiation, surface-wave propagation, frequency selectivity, local resonance, and polarization. Although existing reviews have discussed the mechanisms and structures of metamaterials, systematic discussions that connect metamaterial structures with textile materials, fabrication, and performance remain limited. This review summarizes representative metamaterials used in textile antennas and analyzes their roles in gain enhancement, SAR reduction, miniaturization, multiband operation, and polarization improvement. Common substrates, spacers, and conductive materials are further reviewed, together with fabrication methods such as lamination, embroidery, sewing, weaving, knitting, printing, coating, and laser patterning. Current studies indicate that material variability, conductor loss, fabrication tolerance, layer alignment, deformation stability, and garment integration still restrict practical application. This review is expected to provide a reference for the design and realization of reliable metamaterials for textile antennas.

The scalable manufacturing of all-textile triboelectric pressure sensors capable of high-sensitivity and crosstalk-free pressure distribution mapping remains challenging. This study develops a scalable triboelectric fabric pressure mapping sensor with high sensitivity and free crosstalk by directly interlacing polytetrafluoroethylene/stainless steel (PTFE-SS) braided yarns (negative materials) and the polyamide 66/stainless steel (PA66-SS) braided yarn (positive materials) into the plain derivative weave fabric on an industrialized loom, enabling scalable production. Crucially, the results demonstrate that reducing warp/weft densities significantly boosts electrical output. We further establish the first equivalent circuit model (FO-ECM) for the triboelectric woven fabric pressure mapping sensor, achieving a 0.978 fitting coefficient to predict output under varying weave densities, thereby enabling digital parametric design. Significantly, parameter optimization of warp/weft densities identified an optimal configuration that enhances electrical output, achieving high sensitivity (2.942 V·kPa^-1, 0-1 kPa). Furthermore, the triboelectric woven fabric pressure sensor was extended to develop an interference-free triboelectric fabric sensor array (TFSA) through structural spacing design, eliminating crosstalk by elucidating the dominant role of fringe electric fields and quantitatively modeling their spatial decay, thereby enabling high-spatial-resolution pressure mapping. Finally, the distributed pressure mapping of typical human body activities demonstrated the practical performance of the developed triboelectric fabric sensor. This facile integrated approach─from scalable fabrication to interference-free arrays─advances real-time wearable self-powered health monitoring.

The advancement of wearable technologies has resulted in significant interest in GNSS-integrated textile antenna development. Although existing literature surveys predominantly concentrate on flexible non-textile antenna systems operating within UHF and 5G frequency spectra, systematic investigations of textile-based antenna configurations in the 1–2 GHz GNSS band have been relatively scarce. Contemporary GNSS textile antenna architectures primarily target GPS frequency coverage, while the global proliferation of BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) infrastructure necessitates urgent development of BDS-compatible textile antenna solutions. This review methodically examines the structural configurations and radiation characteristics of 1–2 GHz textile antennas, bandwidth enhancement techniques, miniaturization methodologies, and gain optimization approaches, along with material selection criteria and manufacturing processes. Technical challenges persist in simultaneously achieving broadband operation, compact dimensions, and elevated gain performance. Primary manufacturing approaches encompassing laminated fabric assemblies, printed electronics, and embroidered conductive patterns are analyzed, while existing methodologies exhibit limited capacity for seamless garment integration. Despite remarkable progress in conductive material engineering, dielectric property modification studies demonstrate insufficient theoretical depth. Comprehensive mitigation strategies for multifaceted operational environments involving human proximity effects, mechanical deformation, and variable meteorological conditions remain notably underdeveloped. This comprehensive analysis aims to establish a foundational framework for next-generation BDS-oriented textile antenna development.

Wearable medical devices play an increasingly important role in disease diagnosis and health management, and self-powered sensors based on the triboelectric principle provide new ideas for the development of wearable respiratory monitoring devices. To overcome the unstable shortage of reported triboelectric yarn with a single electrode and two freestanding electrodes, this work designed a coaxially braided triboelectric-sensing thread (CBTT) with a braided mesh spacer separating two-electrodes, which potentially meets the daily and long-term stable monitoring of human respiratory movements, and the effects of the braiding parameters of the mesh spacer on the performance of the CBTT were discussed. The results show that both the braiding process parameters of the mesh spacer and the specification of the mesh-braiding yarn affect the performance of the prepared CBTT. Among them, CBTT prepared by nylon monofilaments with a diameter of 0.2 mm and a 30° on-machine braiding angle had the best sensing performance under the designed strain range. In addition, for the respiratory state monitoring, the output response and the accuracy of CBTT with a mesh spacer are highest among three kinds of the studied sensing yarns with coaxially braiding structure. These results indicated the stable structure advantage of the seamless integration of a mesh spacer into the coaxially braiding two-electrodes triboelectric sensing yarn and brings new tools for user-friendly health monitoring.