Smart Textiles: Understanding the Challenges Ahead in 2025
In 2025, smart textiles are becoming an increasingly common topic — products that combine the comfort of textiles with the precision of electronics. This fusion promises major innovations and opens the door to new technical opportunities in many fields — from healthcare to industry, and high-performance sports.
But what exactly is a smart textile? What are its applications, its limits, and its true challenges? Let’s explore what can — and cannot — be done today, and what the future holds.
What Is a Smart Textile?
Smart textiles (or e-textiles) are textile-based products, such as garments or accessories, that integrate electronic technologies. They become capable of measuring, reacting, or communicating with their environment.
These products combine:
- Comfort, flexibility, and breathability of textiles,
- with the precision, intelligence, and processing power of electronics.
They are therefore highly technical and complex products that require expertise in several disciplines: textiles, electronics, mechanics, and often design.
At AQ-Tech, we identify specific markets where these technologies make the most sense and bring the greatest value.
Learn more about our Smart Textile expertise and how we transform these technologies into reliable, industrialized products.
Main Application Fields
Healthcare
In this field, smart textiles go far beyond tracking daily activity, as connected watches already do. We focus on embedded medical monitoring solutions capable of measuring precise physiological signals for disease tracking, rehabilitation, or relapse prevention.
Applications range from post-operative monitoring at home to long-term follow-up of chronic conditions, with sensors integrated directly into the garment. The goal: continuous, discreet, and comfortable monitoring for the patient.
Our teams support multiple projects in connected healthcare. Discover our rapid prototyping capabilities to validate your smart medical textile concepts.
Sports Performance
In sports, smart textiles aim to analyze and improve movements, forces, and postures of athletes — both in training and competition. Every movement counts, and only embedded systems allow precise, real-world measurement under real conditions, beyond the limits of biomechanics labs.
These products make it possible to:
- Reduce injuries from overuse or muscle imbalance,
- Detect postural asymmetries and fatigue,
- Analyze applied forces during specific movements.
We collaborate with sports and biomechanics experts to design robust, accurate intelligent textile products. Learn more about our Smart Textile expertise.
Industry and Safety
In industrial environments, smart textiles are not about turning operators into robots — they aim to monitor posture and effort to prevent injuries (MSDs, muscle fatigue, strain, etc.).
Our solutions are designed to fit into demanding, long-lasting environments. Discover our expertise in industrializing connected textile systems.
Architecture of a Smart Textile Product
A smart textile product combines several technologies: textile, electronics, mechanics, and sometimes software. These disciplines must coexist within one system to ensure comfort, precision, and durability.
These technologies are typically divided into three families: sensors, actuators, and integration.
Sensors
Measuring a physiological or mechanical signal requires sensors capable of converting physical parameters into usable data. In smart textiles, we mainly use:
• Electrodes
Electrodes measure weak electrical signals such as ECG (heart activity), EMG (muscle activity), or bio-impedance. At AQ-Tech, we use various types of electrodes depending on the application:
- Dry electrodes for comfortable, long-term use,
- “Gecko” electrodes with adhesive effect to minimize motion artifacts,
- Flexible polymer electrodes, printed or woven directly into the fabric.
Each measurement type requires a specific choice of electrode, positioning, and electronic processing.
• Motion sensors (IMU)
IMUs (Inertial Measurement Units) combine accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers. They measure position, speed, and acceleration of the body in space. By placing several IMUs on the right body segments, we can calculate joint angles, analyze full-body motion, and detect asymmetries.
• Other textile sensors
Depending on the application, other sensors can also be integrated:
- Stretch sensors to monitor posture or joint flexion,
- Pressure or circumference sensors, such as inductive plethysmography, widely used for respiratory monitoring in medical applications.
Actuators
Smart textiles are not limited to measurement — they can also act and interact with the user. We integrate, for example:
- Localized vibration elements to provide tactile feedback (posture alerts, directional cues, sports feedback, etc.),
- Light elements for signaling or visualization,
- and in some cases, electrostimulation electrodes to activate specific muscles.
These features create an intelligent feedback loop: the textile becomes a system that can measure, process, and respond to the user.
Integration
Integration is probably the biggest challenge in smart textiles. All components must be integrated into the fabric without compromising comfort, accuracy, or manufacturability.
This involves several technical choices:
- How to connect components (connectors, conductive yarns, woven ribbons, printed films, etc.),
- How to protect sensitive areas (encapsulation, overmolding, lamination),
- How to maintain flexibility, washability, and aesthetics.
The goal is a robust, repeatable, and durable solution that remains comfortable and wearable.
Textile-electronic integration is at the core of our work. Visit our production workshop to discover our in-house assembly and fabrication capabilities.
Technical Challenges of Smart Textiles
Turning an idea into a market-ready product requires going far beyond a functional prototype. Although many technologies are now accessible, developing a reliable and industrial-grade product remains a real challenge.
The current challenges of smart textiles revolve around three main aspects: industrialization, robustness, and repairability.
Industrialization
Without an industrializable product, even the best concept remains an idea. It’s essential to use technologies compatible with manufacturing processes, while controlling cost and repeatability.
At AQ-Tech, we are working on standardizing textile-electronic integration methods to ease assembly, maintenance, and production scaling.
Robustness and Washability
A technical product should not mean a fragile one. Many smart textile components are still sensitive to bending, stretching, and humidity, which limits their lifespan.
Washability remains one of the greatest challenges: each washing cycle subjects the product to mechanical and chemical stress. The goal is to design systems that can withstand these stresses without compromising performance or comfort.
To address this, AQ-Tech develops flexible encapsulation and overmolding methods tailored to textile constraints.
Repairability and Sustainability
Protecting electronic components often requires encapsulation, which makes repairs difficult or impossible. In case of failure, the entire product often needs to be replaced.
In a sustainable and circular economy approach, it becomes crucial to design smart textiles that are repairable, modular, and recyclable.
At AQ-Tech, we integrate disassembly and partial replacement strategies from the design stage to extend product lifespan and reduce environmental impact.
These issues are central to our innovation approach. They are addressed through our Exploration & Innovation department to develop the solutions of tomorrow.
Conclusion
Smart textiles represent one of the most promising paths in product innovation today. They combine the softness of fabric with the precision of electronics, enabling new applications across healthcare, sports, industry, and beyond.
But turning a concept into a reliable, industrialized product requires mastering every step of development: design, prototyping, testing, industrialization, and integration.
At AQ-Tech, we know how to combine textile, electronic, and mechanical technologies to bring intelligent, robust, and production-ready products to life.
We are constantly exploring new processes, materials, and components to push the boundaries of performance and reliability.
From feasibility to mass production, AQ-Tech supports clients at every stage of development.
Would you like to develop a smart textile product or discuss the feasibility of a project? Contact us to speak with our engineering team.
