Review of performance evaluation on e-textiles and textile-based keypads

Within textile fields, there is active research into employing electronic, photonic and photovoltaic textiles. Developments of electrically conductive textile materials are one of the key issues in recent smart textile research. We have developed electrically conductive fabrics using the Cu/Ni electroless plating finish and Cu sputtering. Commercially available narrow bands were developed with the core-spun yarn of polyester and stainless steel yarns treated with teflon and silicon coatings. We also examined textile-based keypads by using rubber domes and metal domes to increase the feedback of the keypad for users and developed commercially available switch fabrics for the keypads by adopting the metallic domes. This article deals with a review of the performance evaluation research done from 2004 to 2009 in our laboratory at Yonsei University on the developed products.