# Future Trend in Wearable Electronics in the Textile Industry
## 2 Popular Applications of Wearable Technology  
There are three important areas where wearable technology is growing the fastest [9; 15; 16], which are:  
_(a)_  _Health_  
Wearable technologies for health and fitness represent some of the earliest and most popular applications [9]. Traditional medicine diagnoses, clinical interventions, and rehabilitation treatments require patients to be monitored over time. The technology is leading a slow evolution within modern healthcare. The power of wearable technology as a pragmatic and clinically useful technology to aid patient diagnosis, treatment, and care is becoming evident. This is due to its low-cost ability to gather habitual data in a discrete manner for longitudinal periods in any environment. Integration to the cloud provides readily available big data, facilitating the application of machine learning algorithms for novel outcomes [17]. Using wearable devices for the automatic monitoring of mental behavior is a feasible approach and a key marker of wellbeing for monitoring individuals with health conditions. Moreover, due to approximately 90% of our bodies typically being covered by clothing, the use of smart garments is promising. Figure 5 shows some examples of recent developments in wearable electronics for monitoring human health  
Figure 4: Systemization of wearable electronic systems. information [15]. Figure 5 presents the general working principles of a wearable electronic. In this example, each sensor is responsible for the specific measurement and analysis for monitoring human health information. With the challenge of an aging population, one of the biggest drivers of market growth in this field is the need to reduce healthcare costs, in particular admissions of patients in hospitals [18]. There is a global trend in telemedicine programs, an effective way of telemonitoring patients remotely, to help address the cost of hospital admissions [19; 20; 21]. In general, human movement monitoring often needs to be associated with continuous and synchronous recording of various body signals and vital signs and electromyographic response, particularly in applications such as sports and wellness as well as medical diagnostics and rehabilitation [4; 22]. Medical applications usually require measuring real-time data to quantify user ability and to provide deeper measuring capability [4]. Wearable technology started to revolutionize healthcare by assisting doctors in the operating room and providing real-time access to electronic health records [9; 23]. Some of the more novel products include baby monitors and smart shirts or biometric smart wear to record heart rate, footsteps, and calories burned per day. Fabric sensors can be used for electrocardiogram, electromyography, and electroencephalography sensing; fabrics incorporating thermocouples can be used for sensing temperature; luminescent elements integrated in fabrics could be used for biophotonic sensing; shape-sensitive fabrics can sense movement and can be combined with electromyography sensing to derive muscle fitness. Carbon electrodes integrated into fabrics can be used to detect specific environmental or biomedical features such as oxygen, salinity, moisture, or contaminants [2; 24; 25; 26; 27; 28; 29; 30]. These devices are becoming increasingly important in the field of medical sciences [9; 19]. Entertainment  
Smart wearable devices such as miniature cameras can easily be worn on a garment while being controlled via a mobile app. These wearable devices can perform many of the computing tasks that mobile phones and laptop computers do [16]. This development is largely due to the availability of better touch screens and higher resolution cameras. Hence, this opens up another area of mobile app development wherein smart mobile apps will be created specifically to control various wearable devices [31]. Such devices have embedded software to control the device via commands received from a mobile app [9; 16].