Scientometric analysis of textile sensors

Textile sensors have been widely used in many applications such as healthcare, sports, and entertainment. Focusing on the scientific evolution in the research field of textile sensors, this paper presents a comprehensive review on the academic publications, research hotspots, and major research directions in the field based on scientometric analysis. Totally 3,820 papers published between the year 1991 and 2023 were retrieved and investigated from the Web of Science Core Collection. The software CiteSpace and VOSviewer were adopted to perform scientometric analysis on the collaboration between countries, regions, and institutions. In addition, the citations and co-citations of authors, the source journals, the references, and the co-occurrence of keywords were analyzed. Furthermore, five main research directions in the field of textile sensors were also summarized in this paper, and the most promising and potentially profitable research direction could be health monitoring. The analysis result shows that the research hotspots in recent years include the development of triboelectric nanogenerator, the manufacture of transparent skin-like sensors and optical fiber sensors, the process of data collected from wearable textile sensors, and the design of new materials such as nanocomposites for textile sensors.