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Increasing demand of using everyday clothing in wearable sensing and display has synergistically advanced the field of electronic textiles, or e-textiles. A variety of types of e-textiles have been formed into stretchy fabrics in a manner that can maintain their intrinsic properties of stretchability, breathability, and wearability to fit comfortably across different sizes and shapes of the human body. These unique features have been leveraged to ensure accuracy in capturing physical, chemical, and electrophysiological signals from the skin under ambulatory conditions, while also displaying the sensing data or other immediate information in daily life. Here, we review the emerging trends and recent advances in e-textiles in wearable sensing and display, with a focus on their materials, constructions, and implementations. We also describe perspectives on the remaining challenges of e-textiles to guide future research directions toward wider adoption in practice. 

Abstract Increasing demand for wearable healthcare synergistically advances the field of electronic textiles, or e‐textiles, allowing for ambulatory monitoring of vital health signals. Despite great promise, the pragmatic deployment of e‐textiles in clinical practice remains challenged due to the lack of a method in producing custom‐designed e‐textiles at high spatial resolution across a large area. To this end, a programmable dual‐regime spray that enables the direct custom writing of functional nanoparticles into arbitrary fabrics at sub‐millimeter resolution over meter scale is employed. The resulting e‐textiles retain the intrinsic fabric properties in terms of mechanical flexibility, water‐vapor permeability, and comfort against multiple uses and laundry cycles. The e‐textiles tightly fit various body sizes and shapes to support the high‐fidelity recording of physiological and electrophysiological signals on the skin under ambulatory conditions. Pilot field tests in a remote health‐monitoring setting with a large animal, such as a horse, demonstrate the scalability and utility of the e‐textiles beyond conventional devices. This approach will be suitable for the rapid prototyping of custom e‐textiles tailored to meet various clinical needs.