Recent Advances of Textile-based Glucose Sensors: Fabrication, Methods, Properties, and Mechanisms

The high prevalence of diabetes requires simple, continuous, and accurate monitoring of glucose level for diabetic patients in daily life. Recent researches have been geared toward flexible and wearable sensors to realize non-invasive detection and continuous glucose monitoring from body fluids, such as sweat, saliva, and tears. This review mainly summarizes the recent development of textile-based glucose sensors using silk, cotton, and synthetic polymers and fabrics as substrates and discusses their fabrication processes and working mechanism. In particular, the characteristics of these textile-based glucose sensors are analyzed and the sensing performances are compared. Based on this review, the challenges and prospects of textile-based glucose sensors are also proposed. Although the textile-based glucose sensors still have some problems, they show great application potential, which also presents new challenges and development directions for the application of the textiles.