Personal Moisture Management by Advanced Textiles and Intelligent Wearables

As global climate change intensifies, personal moisture management (PMM) is increasingly crucial for regulating body temperature and near-skin humidity, sustaining comfort, health, and productivity. Advances in textile materials and wearable technologies are moving PMM beyond traditional wicking-drying and waterproof-breathable designs toward directional sweat transport, stimuli-responsive control, and integration with personal thermal management (PTM). Advanced textiles and intelligent wearables enable more efficient, adaptive PMM; meanwhile, effective PMM enhances sensing performance and long-term comfort of wearable systems, and supports sweat-based health monitoring and energy harvesting, forming closed-loop, intelligent comfort-health-performance ecosystems. This review critically discusses PMM mechanisms and designs from capillary wicking and evaporation/diffusion to directional water transport and responsive moisture regulation, alongside manufacturing strategies spanning advanced fibers, nanoengineering, bioinspired architectures, smart polymers, and wearable electronics. PMM-enabled implementations in health monitoring and energy harvesting are introduced, and elucidate coupled moisture-heat transport to guide the co-optimization of PMM and PTM. Finally, key challenges are outlined, including sweat accumulation, reduced durability and washability, limited manufacturing scalability, and insufficient cross‑scenario adaptability, and offer potential solutions, particularly AI‑enabled pathways for intelligent, sustainable, next‑generation PMM textiles and wearables.