A Review on PVDF Nanofibers in Textiles for Flexible Piezoelectric Sensors

Textiles are turning into a suitable next-generation sensing platform because of their good breathability, softness, and structural elasticity. Besides, research on self-powered piezoelectric sensors is a hot topic in wearable applications; they can perform long-term sensing and monitoring. Therefore, this paper mainly reviews the development progress of PVDF-based textiles on flexible piezoelectric sensors. In this paper, we first introduce the principle of the piezoelectric effect and the classification of piezoelectric materials; then we summarize the structure and characteristics of nanofiber mat-based, yarn-based, and fabric-based flexible piezoelectric sensors and the approaches that are employed to fabricate PVDF-based textile piezoelectric sensors such as melt spinning, electrospinning, and stretch forming processes, and so on. At last, we review their applicability in the application of electronic skin, human–computer interaction, healthcare, and human movement monitoring and demonstrate the facing difficulties and the future research directions of PVDF-based textile flexible sensors.