Polymeric optical fibres and future prospects in textile integration

In the era of wearable computing, intelligent systems are breaking the bounds of traditional textiles and their design. The integration of the technologies with clothing, accessories, upholstery, or industrial technical textiles provides higher user-comfort and enables their seamless use in everyday activities. Polymer optical fibre materials are suitable for short-distance data transfer and can be combined with textile structures. The manufacture of the fibre is low cost, and the products are more durable than glass optic fibres. Applications for POF today are known in the automotive industry, consumer electronics, cabling, and measuring as optodes. Polymeric optical fibre (POF) made of PMMA has been on the market for the past 25 years, used for simple light guide and data transmission application. Perfluor polymers (PF) offer great new opportunities in the field of data communication because of low absorption losses. Optical polycarbonate (PC), and polystyrene (PS) are used for special applications. The POF materials are introduced, and their opportunities in textile integration are discussed.