A Brief Review of 3D Printing Technologies and Materials Used in Smart Textiles

3D printing technology has made significant strides in smart textiles—fabrics embedded with electronics like conductive fibers and sensors—now widely applied in areas such as health con-dition monitoring, wearable energy-harvesting devices, and interactive textiles that respond to environmental conditions and color changes. Different 3D printing methods, such as Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), Direct Ink Writing (DIW), and PolyJet printing, are used in the fabrication of smart textiles. This study provides a detailed, applica-tion-specific overview of 3D printing technologies—such as FDM, SLS, DIW, and PolyJet print-ing—and their use in smart textiles across various sectors, including wearable technology, medical textiles, and smart fashion design. We gathered articles and reports from Scopus and Google Scholar, providing a concise assessment of 3D printing materials for smart textiles to give readers a quick understanding of the field. The timeline of 3D printing’s use in smart textiles, from 2016 to 2023, highlights significant advancements in various additive manufacturing techniques applied to smart textiles. The review emphasizes the importance of understanding 3D printing techniques such as FDM, SLS, DIW, and PolyJet, as their applicability for selecting the best approach to in-corporating advanced functionalities into smart textiles.