The assignee ranking covers 100 companies, with the leader holding 47 of the 892 records in scope and the fifth-placed company holding 25. Combined, the top five assignees hold 19.8% of all records, which means the field has a visible leader but no single dominant blocking portfolio. Beyond the ranked group there is a long tail of companies with only one or two filings each, spanning textile machinery makers, wearable-electronics firms and medical-device companies. Anyone assessing competitive position should look at both the ranked leaders and the fragmented tail, since the tail is where niche technical approaches often sit.

Filing peaked at 58 records in 2019 and the most recent complete comparison shows a 24% decline, from 29 records in 2021 to 22 in 2024. Figures for 2025 and 2026 appear lower still, but that is expected: publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so the newest years are undercounted and should not be read as evidence of further decline. The honest read is that filing cooled after a 2019 peak and has not yet clearly recovered based on the complete years available.

The bulk of records sit in fabric-construction classes: D03D, woven fabrics and weaving, covers 52.1% of the 892 records, and D04B, knitting, covers 35.1%. Application-side classes follow, with A41D (outerwear and garments) at 23.4% and A61B (diagnosis and surgery) at 17.2%, showing apparel and health monitoring as the two largest end uses. Pure electronics integration, H05K, appears in only 11.3% of records, meaning most patents still frame the invention primarily as a textile with an added function rather than a circuit with a fabric substrate.

US11913146B1, granted in 2024 to the US Air Force, claims an electrode built from a conductive textile structure whose outer surface carries a continuous carbon nanotube fibre fabric formed by knitting, weaving, sewing or embroidery. It does not claim conductive textiles generally; it is specific to a carbon nanotube fibre used as the conductive element and to the electrode-cathode application. Work using conventional metal-coated or intrinsically conductive polymer yarns, or work outside the electrode/cathode use case, sits outside this claim's scope, though anyone building CNT-fibre-based textile electrodes should chart their construction against it directly.

The technology composition data shows H05K (printed circuits) at only 11.3% of records against D03D and D04B each above a third, which suggests the deeper fusion of textile-construction claims with circuit-level claims is still a minority activity. Combined with a long tail of single-filing entrants below the top five assignees, this points to under-claimed space in fully integrated woven or knit circuitry rather than fabric-plus-attached-sensor designs. A first claim in this space would typically need to tie a specific weave or knit topology directly to a defined electrical function, rather than claiming the fabric and the circuit as separately joined elements.