Smart textiles potential put at $130 bn by 2025

Smart textiles are creating a fourth industrial revolution for the textiles and fashion industry worth over $130 billion by 2025, according to the recent report from technology consultancy Cientifica. Advances in fields such as nanotechnology are creating a range of textile–based technologies with the ability to sense and react to the world around them. According to Cientifica, the rapid adoption of smart textile technologies has the ability to make the current generation of wearables from Apple and Samsung quickly obsolete, while providing significant opportunities in the sportswear market.

Instead of attaching a sensor to a garment, the sensor is increasingly the garment itself, providing significant opportunities in health and wellbeing, sports, medical monitoring, fashion and entertainment. The report tracks over a hundred of the leading companies in a sector predicted to show triple digit growth, and examines issues ranging from data acquisition to energy storage and generation. “With most people never out of Bluetooth range of their smartphones, the use of smart textiles makes the idea of miniaturising a subset of smart phone components and wearing it on the wrist completely unnecessary. As a result, wearables will become disappearables,” commented Tim Harper, report lead author.

Textile-based technologies

Advances in fields such as nanotechnology, organic electronics and conducting polymers are creating a range of textile–based technologies with the ability to sense and react to the world around them. This includes monitoring biometric data such as heart rate and respiration, or environmental factors such as temperature and the presence of toxic gases. These textiles also have the ability to provide real time feedback in the form of haptic feedback, changes in colour, temperature or electrical stimuli. The report identifies three distinct generations of textile wearable technologies. First generation is where a sensor is attached to apparel and is the approach currently taken by major sportswear brands such as Adidas, Nike and Under Armour. Second generation products embed the sensor in the garment as demonstrated by products from Samsung, Alphabet, Ralph Lauren and Flex. In third generation wearables the garment is the sensor and a growing number of companies including AdvanPro, Tamicare and BeBop sensors are making rapid progress in creating pressure, strain and temperature sensors. The report identifies third generation wearables as representing a significant opportunity for new and established textile companies to add significant value without having to directly compete with Apple, Samsung and Intel.

Rise of textile wearables

The rise of textile wearables also represents a significant opportunity for manufacturers of the advanced materials used in their manufacture. Toray, Panasonic, Covestro, DuPont and Toyobo are already suppling the necessary materials, while researchers are creating sensing and energy storage technologies, from flexible batteries to graphene supercapacitors which will power tomorrows wearables.

In recent years we have seen enormous developments in digital technology. The performance of data transmission and processing is still growing exponentially.

In the next few years we will all be surprised by technological changes and breakthroughs in the textile industry. This is especially interesting in regard to new smart clothes and engineered fabrics. Research institutes and leading companies worldwide are working every day on pioneering solutions bringing attractive new concepts to the market.

Consumer Advantages

In the smart clothes sector this opens up completely new possibilities for consumers by allowing them to wear intelligent wearables which are truly useful to them. These kinds of clothes will change our life considerably, just like smart phones, tablets and other gadgets did in the recent past.

In a few years from now smart clothes become the norm and we will not want to miss them anymore. In the future, for example, underwear will play an increasingly important role for continuous monitoring of vital bodily functions. Breathing, heart rate and muscle tension are indicators of your health status. One can imagine that fatigue detection systems and new active safety systems can be developed to prevent dangerous or life-threatening situations.

Dr Anita Ajay Desai is a part of faculty with the Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology, Bengaluru. She can be contacted at: anitaajaydesai@gmail.com