Health, smart textiles

Smart textiles benefit from intrinsic properties of textiles such as flexibility to conform to the body, comfort to touch, softness, wearability, and the familiarity of the textile (Black, 2007). This offers tremendous opportunities for applications on and close to the body, for example, in well-being and medical contexts such as rehabilitation. Embodiment plays an important role in these contexts the textile industry revolves around materiality and health care practitioners strongly emphasise the bodily abilities of their clients (physical rehabilitation, movement). However, when services... 

Kirstein, T., Lawrence, M., Troster, G., 2003. Functional electrical stimulation (FES) with smart textile electrodes. In International Workshop on a New Generation Of Wearable Systems for E-health, Pisa, Italy. 

Smart textiles are emerging as important materials in the fields of medicine and health care. Advances in Smart Medical Textiles explores the range of smart textiles available for use in medicine and the transfer of these innovative technologies into medical applications. 

One example of such smart textile applications is in health monitoring [50]. Placement of electrically conducting fibres in smart material clothing can be... 

Smart textile and polymer fibres for structural health monitoring... 

Initially, and from a purely technical point of view, the smart textile concept may be perceived as the result of a convergence between two industries textiles and electronics. The miniaturization of electronics makes it possible for people to carry with them all kinds of devices, qualified as portables , that have functions ranging from leisure (Walkman, MP3, portable television) to communication and information management (mobile phones, personal digital assistants) to health (pacemakers, physiological sensors of parameters). 

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