CO-FINANCED PROJECTS
The symbiosis of textiles with wearable computing, augmented reality, human machine interfaces, media and interface design and the collaboration between established electronics and textile industries currently lead to a totally new class of flexible, conformable informative and interactive wearable systems. Mainly, there are 2 kinds of smart clothes:
SFIT market is defined by
The current market size for wearable computing and smart fabrics and interactive textiles (SFIT) is modest but presents a strong future outlook. Estimated around $300 million at 2003 for SFIT-enabled products with an annual average growth rate round 20%. Growth rates vary dramatically by application segment and vertical markets; the highest growth is expected in consumer entertainment, health status monitoring and military applications. The following forecasts give more detailed market information:
Research and Development is multidisciplinary and multisectorial. Stakeholders are convinced that no one sector or technology can do it alone. The integration of, advanced fibers (electrically conductive) and materials at the fiber core (polymers, carbon nanotubes, magnetic nanoparticles, quantum tunneling composites), microelectronics components (e.g. chip modules, Bluetooth), user interfaces (sensors, displays, speakers) and power sources (e.g. thermogeneration, photovoltaic) and embedded software makes R&D extremely challenging. In addition, SFIT should fulfil user needs and expectations in terms of user-friendliness/functionality, cost, fabric resistance, comfort, robustness and reliable and accurate performance. Today´ challenge is to fuse research work and consumer insights on Smart Clothing and create multi-disciplinary teams of product & electronic designers and engineers. The cluster deals with integration of technologies and functionalities, systems and several applications e.g. health, well being, protection and disaster management.
The cluster deals with integration of technologies and functionalities, systems and several applications e.g. health, well being, protection, disaster management.
A special category of SFIT is the Intelligent Biomedical Clothing (IBC). Future developments of intelligent biomedical clothing will be based on the full integration of sensors/actuators, energy sources, processing and communication within the clothes.
The most promising applications from business point of view have been identified, through market studies, as metabolic, cardiovascular and neurological. In the future, smart fabrics with embedded functions will enable quality of life support, for instance by control of motions, monitoring and therapy of stress, monitoring of overweight and body fat, immunization, control of various biofeedback mechanisms and applications against geriatric diseases. Rehabilitation and treatment could highly benefit from advances in materials, sensing and actuation techniques and haptic interfaces.
An innovative approach for the development of biomedical clothing was pioneered by WEALTHY, co-financed by the European Commission. It is based on the use of standard textile industrial processes to realize the sensing elements. Transduction functions are implemented in the same knitted system where movements and vital signs are converted into readable signals, which can be acquired, processed and transmitted. Electrodes and bus structure are integrated in textile material making possible to perform normal daily activity while user´s health status is monitored by a specialist in an unobtrusive way. MyHeart is another project co-financed by the European Commission which follows the tracks of WEALTHY, further developing specific technologies (dry electrodes, on-body signal processing, interconnection, ...) and trying them on several applications. The vision of the cluster is represented in the roadmap scheme.
During the 6th Framework program, the EC developed SFIT activities from technology & system development and integration as well as from application point-of-view, through the IST program. R&D in FP7 will reinforce the converging technologies approach and will provide the right technologies and systems e.g. body-worn sensors, smart fabrics, intelligent pills, biochips and implant devices for integration and building of new personal health applications in monitoring and diagnosis, therapy, rehabilitation and substitution of vital functions.
SFIT CLUSTER OF EC
CO-FINANCED PROJECTS