Beyond Thermal Comfort: A Comprehensive Review of Multifunctional Personal Thermal Management Wearables

ABSTRACT Personal thermal management (PTM) has emerged as a vital frontier for protecting individual health, mitigating societal energy burdens, and combating global climate change. Although traditionally focused on passive textiles for localized thermal comfort, the rapid evolution of stretchable, rigid‐flex bioelectronics has redefined the contemporary PTM landscape. Grounded in a statistical analysis of recent literature, this review establishes an expanded scope for PTM comprising four interconnected aspects: thermal sensing, thermal regulation, thermal therapy, and thermal energy harvesting. Although fundamental thermodynamic regulation remains the operational core, modern wearables increasingly leverage multifunctional material platforms for versatile and practical applications—ranging from physiological diagnosis and regulation to experiential demands of virtual and augmented reality. We systematically examine practical thermal regulation strategies, summarize emerging functional material platforms, and analyze application‐centered outcomes across diverse scenarios in both comfort and non‐comfort. Finally, we address critical bottlenecks hindering the transition from laboratory prototypes to industrial products, offering a forward‐looking perspective on the evolution from passive textiles toward multimodal, biomimetic, and data‐driven intelligent closed‐loop wearable systems.