Wearable Actuators: An Overview

The booming wearable market and recent advances in material science has led to the rapid development of various sensors, actuators, devices that can be worn, embedded fabric, accessorized, or tattooed directly onto skin. Wearable a subcategory technology, have attracted enormous interest from researchers disciplines many actuators been developed past few decades assist improve people’s everyday lives. In this paper, we review actuation mechanisms, structures, applications, limitations recently including pneumatic hydraulic shape memory alloys polymers, thermal hygroscopic materials, dielectric elastomers, ionic conducting piezoelectric electromagnetic liquid crystal etc. Examples applications such as soft robots, haptic devices, personal regulation textiles are highlighted. Finally, point out current bottleneck suggest prospective future research directions for actuators.