Textile Radio-Frequency Active Devices and Systems: Wireless Communication and Energy Harvesting

The integration of wearable technology and smart textiles has substantially advanced the development of radio-frequency (RF) electronics embedded in textile substrates, opening new opportunities across health monitoring, environmental sensing, and wireless communication. Despite their established performance, conventional rigid RF systems face inherent limitations in conformability and seamless integration within wearable platforms. This review comprehensively summarizes recent progress in textile-based RF active devices, encompassing reconfigurable antennas, tunable metasurfaces, and multifunctional RF systems. We emphasize the transition from isolated components to fully integrated, intelligent platforms capable of energy harvesting, low-power communication, and distributed sensing while proposing solution strategies and future development directions for enriched and systematic performance. Critical technical challenges such as high-precision fabrication, tunable RF response, and architecture design for complex systems are thoroughly discussed. Ultimately, this review outlines promising pathways toward autonomous, adaptive, and intelligently networked textile RF systems, highlighting the convergence of wireless functionality and system-level co-design for the next generation of wearable electronics.