EU-projects in smart textiles and clothing
A number of EU-projects in smart textiles have been supported the last decades. Most of the supported projects are within the health monitoring area. Another type of projects at EU-level develop enabling technologies for smart textiles, for example stretchable electronics, integration of electronics in textiles, technologies that are necessary for the development of smart textiles applications.
Health monitoring for medical assistance
Health monitoring is a general concerns for patient requiring continuous medical assistance and treatment. In order to increase mobility for such patients a huge effort has been pursued for the development of wearable systems for the monitoring of physiological parameters such as respiration, cardiac activity or temperature of the body. Smart textiles play a growing role in these developments since they are well suited for wearability and washability that ensures the comfort for the user.
Wealthy
The Wealthy project [Wealthy] was one of the first EU-projects aiming to set up comfortable health monitoring system based on textile sensors, advanced signal processing techniques and modern telecommunication systems. The focus areas were cardiac patients during rehabilitation but also to assist professional workers to consider physical and physiological stress and environmental and professional health risks. In this project two types of sensors were developed for the integration in garments. The first sensor was a lycra based fabric coated with carbon black and rubber for the recording of breathing rate. The other sensor was made of metal-based yarns for the monitoring of heart rate. All sensors were integrated in a fully garment knitting process. Together with the textile development a miniaturized short-range wireless system was developed in order to transfer biophysiological signals from the garment to a computer or a mobile phone, Figure 1.