Page 30 - Read Online

Page 2 of 38 Wei et al. Soft Sci 2023;3:17 https://dx.doi.org/10.20517/ss.2023.09

INTRODUCTION
Driven by the Fourth Industrial Revolution represented by intelligent technology, the fields of artificial
intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, and 5G information technology have ushered in a stage
of vigorous development . The intelligent interconnection between humans and machines is the
[1-3]
[4-7]
foundation and key to the progress of today’s era . Therefore, the human-machine interface, as an
information exchange interface between humans and machines, has become a technology that is now in
urgent need of development and is expected to provide a new interactive experience [8-12] . Wearable
electronic devices have been proven to be a very effective way to realize the human-machine interface, i.e.,
the important medium for connecting people to intelligent machines and the key carrier for interconnecting
people and everything, which have become a research hotspot in academia and industry [13-18] . Wearable
electronic devices that emphasize close human-machine interaction and collaboration have emerged in
large numbers to help people achieve the ultimate goal of combining human intelligence with machine
intelligence [19-21] . However, they are often limited by issues such as uncomfortable wearing, inconvenience of
portability, and poor skin fitting, which leaves a clear boundary in the practical use of human-machine
interfaces. The emergence of smart textiles that integrate electronic devices into textiles can effectively solve
the shortcomings of other wearable electronic devices. By virtue of the soft, comfortable, and wearable
humanized features of textiles, smart electronic textiles can provide humans with a more convenient and
natural human-machine interface [22-24] .

Therefore, electronic textiles used for human-machine interfaces have developed rapidly, with the
continuous maturity of textile, electronic, information, physics, materials, and other technologies. Many
researchers have reported integrating fibers with sensing functions into textiles to provide sensing and
interaction capabilities for humans and machines [25-28] . Other studies have focused on the use of electronic
textiles to digitally analyze the physiological information and motion information of the human body [29-32] .
Functional sensors can be placed on various parts of the body assisted by electronic textiles to realize
distributed, multi-channel, and multi-parameter sensing. This method of embodying the vital information
of the human body in the form of data paves the way for the digital connection between humans and
machines and the application of human-machine interfaces.

In recent years, many research achievements on electronic textiles have been reported, and there are also
reviews summarizing the research progress of electronic textiles. Some focus on the structural design of
textile devices, the textile preparation process, and application in artificial intelligence [33-35] , while others
emphasize smart textiles for personalized medical care, including wearable point-of-care systems,
healthcare, and sustainability [36-38] . However, to our knowledge, the review of electronic textiles with
multimodal sensing functions and human-machine interface applications has rarely been reported. With
the progress of science and technology and the improvement of living standards, the single functional
electronic textile cannot meet people’s needs for complicated human-machine interactions. Multimodal
sensing capabilities and human-machine interface applications are the main areas of interest at this stage.
This urgently requires electronic textiles to develop towards multifunctionality, intelligence, and
informatization, which poses considerable challenges in terms of materials selection, structural design,
multifunctional integration, and textile manufacturing [22,39] . Currently, multimodal electronic textiles are still
an area that has not been fully studied. More and more researchers are centering on the research of
multimodal electronic textiles that can simultaneously detect multiple stimulation information to better
realize the connection and interaction between humans and machines [40-42] . The motivation of this review is
not only to emphasize the research results of multimodal electronic textiles in recent years but also to
promote the development of smart electronic textiles in the field of human-machine interfaces and
contribute to building an era of intelligent interconnection.