Smart Fabrics - Intelligent Textiles

Humans are more closer to textiles than anything. The last few decades have shown enormous growth in the development of wireless communication technologies, nanoengineering, information technologies, and miniaturization of electronic devices. We can see this development in textiles or fabrics too.

You can see people talking about smart or intelligent textiles. But there is a difference between the terms, ‘Smart’ and ‘Intelligent’. Smart materials or textiles can be defined as the materials and structures which have sense or can sense the environmental conditions or stimuli. While intelligent textiles can be defined as textile structures which not only can sense but also can react and respond to environmental conditions or stimuli. These stimuli and response can be thermal, mechanical, chemical, magnetic, electric or from other source.



According to the way of reaction, they can be divided into passive smart, active smart and very smart materials:

1. Passive smart materials can only sense the environmental conditions or stimuli, they are only sensors, they can't react.
    
2. Active smart materials can sense and also react to the conditions or stimuli.
    
3. Very smart materials can sense, react and adapt themselves according to the environment.

WORKING

There are different circuits embedded with fabric like busses, microcontrollers, Keyboards and touchpads. As you can see in the figure, the microcontroller is directly connected to the square of the fabric. The keypad shown here has been mass-produced using ordinary embroidery techniques and mildly conductive thread.

There is all-fabric capacitive keyboard awailable too. Keyboards can also be made in a single layer of fabric using capacitive sensing, where an array of embroidered or silk-screened electrodes make up the points of contact.

Applications

• Temperature Sensitive Fabrics
  Temperature sensitive fabrics act according to the temperature body. There are many techniques for making such clothes, and one of it is treating the fabric with paraffins. As the body gets hot, the paraffins get more liquid to pass the heat out and as the body gets cold, it gets more solid to keep back heat with the wearer. 

• Health Monitoring Fabrics
  
  Many people have to get regular visits to monitor their health. There are health monitoring fabrics to help them! Wear the Health Monitoring Electronic Wearables and stay free of worries. The clothings enriched with substances like vitamins, algae or nutrients along with other substances to delay ageing or for improving blood circulation or other such benefits are fast becoming popular with the masses.
  
  These life vests can track heart rate, ECG and body temperature. Now the research results are claiming to have developed a smart fabric that could warn its wearer of allergens, by glowing in response. Some of them can even dial emergency number if they detect a problem! It's called super smart!!

• Sports Jacket
  
  It is used to measure the movement of the arm of the sportsman. If you are a cricket fan then you would have known that a bowler can bend his arm upto 15 degrees. So to measure this angle, this kind of jacket is used.

• Self Cleaning Clothes
  
  Self cleaning clothes can clean the stains of food, dirt and even the red wine by itself! Well this can definitely decrease the use of water, energy and detergents. This kind of clothes uses the invisible and thin layer of titanium dioxide nano particles. It cleans the clothes under the sunlight.

• Comfort Seat
  
  Comfort seat is a kind of seat which adjusts itself according to body movements. This sensitive fabric continually monitors body movement at the vehicle occupant’s back and under the legs to achieve optimum comfort and ergonomics.

• Smart Shirts

 

Smart Shirts are made of soft, washable fabric, woven with optical and electrical fibres into it, the ‘Smart shirt’ monitors the wearer’s heart rate, body temperature, respiration and a host of other vital functions. The information can be relayed wirelessly to doctors or personal trainers.

Future applications include shirts for parental use to monitor babies and for military use to provide a trapped soldier’s exact location and give support units exact information about wounds.