Smart Textiles and Wearable Technology – A study of smart textiles in fashion and clothing

2 Foreword This report is the result of a study of the research field smart textiles, which has been carried out within the EU financed Baltic Fashion Project. The report gives an overview of projects combining smart textiles and clothing as a basis of discussions of how smart textile innovation could be introduced in fashion. The overview covers different projects, research as well as commercial projects, within smart textiles and clothing, with a certain focus on European activities. All information is based on literature studies, inquires from the Baltic Fashion partners and search for projects in different databases. The Swedish School of Textiles is the Swedish national contact for the Baltic Fashion project, which aims to promote fashion. Between 2011-2013, activities and research are carried out within various subjects, e.g. mapping production, innovation, smart textiles and wearable technology. Abstract This report covers different projects, research as well as commercial projects, within smart textiles and clothing, with a certain focus on European activities. Each projects is categorized as either EU-project, University project not funded by EU and commercial projects. All information is based on literature studies, inquires from the Baltic Fashion Partners and search for projects in project databases. The collected materials shows that there are research initiative on both European and national levels. In these projects there has been a focus on medical applications and applications concentrated on enabling technologies. Despite an extensive research effort in several projects for over 10 years there are only few smart textile products on the market. In earlier investigations technical and production aspects are explained as barriers for the commercialisation of smart textiles. Fashion is rarely mentioned as a potential area for smart textiles. However, in this report it is most of the companies that are found are deals with fashion. The companies are certainly small and several authors dismiss the potential in their applications as more or less uninteresting. Despite these opinions the report shows that fashion players take private economical risks by producing and selling smart textile fashion products. The new companies also shows ability to take lead in using new developed technologies in their applications in order to avoid the technical barriers. The argument that the new companies are too small to consider also shows expectancy that smart textiles concern mass consumption and mass production, which is not necessarily the case. Several of the companies have focused on tailor-made solutions for …