Engineered clothing will include gadgets

Electronic devices in the past few decades have increasingly been focused on portability and ease of use.  Look at the Apple iPod: the earliest iPod offered the ability to store thousands of songs on a pocket-sized device.  Since then, the basic premise of a small music player has persisted, with features such as touch-screen and voice control, giving the user a better experience.  
However, what if instead of taking a device out of your pocket to swipe your finger on the screen, all you had to do was swipe your pocket?  Based on a set of recent papers published in Smart Materials and Structures and the Journal of the Electrochemical Society, this scenario may soon become a reality.
A typical electronic system requires three main things: a power supply, a suite of sensors and actuators and some controlling electronic circuitry. Maksim Skorobogatiy, a researcher at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in Canada, has developed one and two-dimensional touch pads and integrated batteries in woven textiles.
The batteries were made using lithium ion technology, though packaged in very thin, narrow strips, which were woven into textiles. The sensors were made in a similar way, by making capacitors in the form of long strings. The new fibers measure touch location by characterizing the AC signal produced when touched at a given location.  When a hand touches a touchpad, a small amount of electric charge is transferred, resulting in a signal that can be exploited to control some other actuator. For example, swiping on a screen may result in headphones increasing volume.  
Touchpads in use today also rely on capacitors, though they typically have a large planar array of small capacitors, each of which reacts to a touch in a precise location. The 2D touchpad produced by Skorobogatiy instead features a woven configuration of 1D capacitive fibers. By aligning the fibers into a dense textile, location of a touch can be accurately measured.
Until fundamental circuitry elements can be made compatible with textiles, traditional electronic packaging will still be required. However, the potential for flexible power sources and human interfaces is a promising indicator.