Welcome to the "Smart and Intelligent Textiles" course.
The course will help you to understand the different types of smart materials that can augment garments, as well as their effects.Prepared by Dr. Benny Malengier and Dr. Granch Berhe Tseghai
Smart textiles are fabrics that have been designed and manufactured to include technologies that provide the wearer with increased functionality. These textiles have numerous potential applications, such as the ability to communicate with other devices, conduct energy, transform into other materials and protect the wearer from environmental hazards. Research and development towards wearable textile-based personal systems allowing health monitoring, protection and safety, and healthy lifestyle gained strong interest during the last few years.
Smart fabrics and interactive textiles’ activities include personal health management through integration, validation, and use of smart clothing and other networked mobile devices as well as projects targeting the full integration of sensors/ actuators, energy sources, processing and communication within the clothes to enable personal applications such as protection/safety, emergency and healthcare. The purpose of the course is to train an "Expert for research and innovation in the smart textile sector" by teaching the essential basics of textile technology and deepening the new development trends relating to materials, processes, ICT application and markets.
Smart textiles with sensing and actuation capabilities have been produced as a single-purpose textile. However, certain function building blocks; may be included in the complete smart textile system.
These consist of Sensor, Actuator, Communication, Interconnection, Control Unit and Power supply.
In order to turn standards textiles into smart textiles, functional materials are used. The main ones are
Smart textiles are defined as textiles (in the shape of shirts, socks, shorts, belts, etc.) that can sense and react to environmental conditions or stimuli, from mechanical, thermal, magnetic, chemical, electrical, or other sources to provide functions such as health monitoring and activity tracking.
They are:
1. Passive Smart textile are materials to which a specific function is added by means of material, composition, construction, and/or finishing (e.g., by applying additives or coatings)
Several methods are used to integrate the different parts to get a smart textile structure. As a result, the integrating techniques of these starting materials differ.
In civil, military, medical, and other high-risk areas and emergency services, smart fabrics are becoming increasingly popular.
Smart fabrics that monitor the heart rate and immune system, gloves with microphones, mattress sensors, cooling and warming clothing, and reinforcing concrete are all on the market.
Smart textiles can also be utilized to assess light absorption intensity, and smart textiles can detect the radiation zone, allowing environmental dangers to be identified.
We consider examples from