Smart Textiles

Over thousands of years, clothing evolved covering fashion, protective and functional needs and becoming the most natural extension to our bodies. Indeed, compared to other materials, textile fabrics show advantages such as resistance and strength but also ductility and flexibility that permit easy manipulation and ability to adapt to a wide range of end-user requirements. In a digital world, the next step is then to empower textile materials by adding smart functionality to help the aspects of working and living for its wearers. The increasing sensibility of people to health and wellness drives the need of real-time information on physiological parameters and on the environment in which they live, that is the ability to monitor emotions, stress, but also pollution or toxic gases. Likewise, the continuous increase of elderly population, together with the decrease of the health service budget and the awareness to the early detection of pathologies, are a strong input for the development of remote monitoring systems. Moreover, the potential of wearable sensors is also of great interest for the sport and fitness field, in which real-time monitoring of athletes’ physiological parameters is becoming mandatory for performance analysis. Smart Textiles can be defined as fabrics that can sense and react to external stimuli via a pre-defined control mechanism or cognitive driven behaviour. Via sensors integrated directly into clothing, smart textiles are able to track user data and communicate with other electronics to regulate and mitigate potential health risks. Many smart textiles contain elements from both textile and electronics, which need to be combined and used in a non-conventional manner. This means that the current standards for both textiles and electronics cannot always be used as such, but require modifications supported by several sciences such as chemistry, engineering, biology and medicine. Bringing together this expertise to develop the necessary standards is a challenge and requires developing a common language and understanding between these different players. In this session, the state of the art concerning the development of nanostructured functional materials for colorimetric sensors, microelectronic systems for signal processing and thermal conductive textiles will be explored. At the same time, the vision of companies designing new materials to empower and support applications of smart textiles in the future will be discussed.