Commercial activities in smart textile and clothing
Despite an extensive research effort in several projects for over 10 years there are only few smart textile clothing products on the market and the volume of business, if declared, seems to be modest in the context of fashion and clothing. However, there are some new established companies focused in the development and commercialization of smart textile clothing. An interesting aspect in these efforts to commercialize smart textiles is the interdisciplinary collaboration between companies in fashion and electronics respectively. Besides pure fashion companies there are some companies established that sells know how in how to integrate electronics into textiles and clothing.
Fashion and clothing companies
Clothing+
Clothing + [Clothingplus] is a developer and producer of textile integrated sensors for several brands in the sports and medical area, figure 6. The company does not develop the whole system, they develop and produce tailor-made textile structures and products that can measure anything on the human body to customer who develop required hardware and software in order to construct the final measurement system. The company created the first heart rate sensing shirt already in 1998 and in 2002 Clothing plus started mass-producing their heart rate sensor strap in their factory in china. Today clothing plus produces millions of sensor products every year to brands like Suunto, Adidas, Garmin, Philips and Timex. Clothing plus is focused on both sports and health care.