Market Opportunities for Smart Textiles

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Ohmatex ApS INCUBA Science Park

Brendstrupgaardsvej 102 DK-8200 Aarhus N

info@ohmatex.dk www.ohmatex.dk

White paper on Smart garments: a market overview of intelligent textile technologies in apparel.

Christian Dalsgaard1 and Anne Jensen2

Christian Dalsgaard is Director and Founder of smart textile consultancy Ohmatex ApS. Anne Jensen is the company coordinator with responsibility for marketing activities and pro-ject administration.

Ohmatex Aps, Brendstrupgaardsvej 102, 8200 Aarhus N, Denmak

Email: chd@ohmatex.dk

Table of content

Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................... 2

Market overview ................................................................................................................................................ 2

Segmentation and Stakeholders ......................................................................................................................... 3

Market drivers ................................................................................................................................................... 7

Inhibitors ............................................................................................................................................................ 8

Research Focus .................................................................................................................................................. 8

1 Primary contact for correspondance.

2 Email: atj@ohmatex.dk

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Introduction A great deal has changed since we published our first whitepaper on the smart textiles market in 2007. At that point, Ohmatex was one of the few companies working with smart textile development commercially, since then both markets and numbers of stakeholders have grown exponentially, with reported market growth now approaching 30%.

As previously, the aim of this whitepaper is to provide an overview of current trends for companies in the traditional textile and electronics industries who may be looking for opportunities to exploit smart textile technologies.

Definitions

Smart textiles Textiles with the ability to react to different physical stimuli; mechanical, electri-cal, thermal and chemical etc.

SFIT Smart Fabrics and Interactive Textiles (also defined as smart textiles)

Wearable Technology Any electronic device small enough to be worn on the body Interactive Textiles Wearable technology that is integrated into a garment or controlled by and inte-

grated panel or button.

Market overview The last 3 years has seen a dramatic growth in the market for garments using smart textiles and other wear-able technologies. Trends in the sports and clothing industries towards manufacture of specific products for dedicated uses (running, skiing, snowboarding etc.) has not only led to the introduction of products with in-tegrated functions using smart textile technologies, it has also seen the development of virtual communities and widespread apps which offer consumers entirely new experiences and bind them closer to manufacturers. They also provide manufacturers with opportunities to gain direct feed-back as to how consumers use their products.

For a number of years textile companies have been making use of system integrators to help them develop products which combine microelectronics, plastics and ceramics in new smart functional applications. Elec-tronics companies such as Philips and system providers such as RAE Systems are now also entering the mar-ket with commercial solutions that use smart textile developments to improve their monitoring systems etc.

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Segmentation and Stakeholders

Personal Protective Equipment & Safety. According to a 2010 Global Industry Analyst’s report, the global market for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) will approach $33300 million USD by 2015. Al-though this market segment has also slowed down under the economic crisis, companies cannot afford to cut corners on replacement of PPE for long, as the cost of productivity losses and liability for non-compliance with legislation is extremely high.

Within the past couple of years leading PPE suppliers are beginning to embrace wearable technologies for the most exposed professions. Viking Life-Saving Equipment1 is due to launch a fire-fighters jacket with integrated temperature sensing technology at the start of 2011 and Globe Firefighter2

In the fishing industry, the EU financed FP7demonstration project Safe@Sea is developing new protective garments for fishermen with inte-grated buoyancy, man-over-board alerting and textile properties that en-sure protection from the sea and gutting knives without being bulky and while allowing maximum freedom of movement. Project manager Helly Hansen intends to exploit as many features as practically feasibly in subse-quent commercial products.

suits announced the commercial launch of base-layer T-shirts with integrated physiological sensing (based on Zephyrs BioHar-ness technology) for early 2012.

Workwear. Focus in this segment is on garment functionality with textile prop-erties and coatings at the forefront. Closely related to both PPE and military clothing applications, relatively few applications with integrated electronics have been demonstrated in recent years.

Healthcare. With an explosive growth in Telemedicine predicted over the next 5 years, the number of sys-tems offering smart garments for non-obtrusive and non-invasive remote monitoring might be expected to have increased rapidly in recent years. However, despite a number of large and semi-publically financed pro-jects in this field (MyHeart, Wealthy, Context, Myotel etc.) only a limited number of commercial applica-tions for healthcare monitoring have been seen. Initial market players like Vivometrics, who developed and obtained FDA approval for their monitoring vest under the LifeShirt brand, have since ceased trading and the product has now been taken over by RAE Systems3

as a product suited to monitor emergency response staff and Hazmat workers.

Consumer Sports Products. Smart solutions in the consumer sports segment reflect general trends in consumer electronics with T-shirts and pulse monitor straps or belts widely available from a number of brands, where they are marketed as training aids for professional and amateur athletes alike. Data from these are transmitted wirelessly to standard consumer electronics devices; Mp3 players, training watches and iPhone or Android apps.

What is new in the past year or two is the way in which this data can be uploaded to on-line applications de-vised to increase motivation and to enable athletes to compete against themselves and others, as well as monitor their own progress. Large virtual communities are developed around these products providing dis-crete marketing opportunities for manufacturers and allowing manufacturers to gain direct knowledge about how users deploy their equipment.

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Leading brands include Nike+, Adidas MiCoach, Polar and Suunto.

Within the performance clothing segment, solutions offering integrated control of personal music devices have been popular, often based upon a more or less standard concept, similar to that illustrated below.

Sports Marketing. In the past couple of years a whole new segment has emerged based on exploitation of smart solutions to promote fan loyalty and brand commitment by providing opportunities for on-line and real-time interactions via increasingly widespread social media such as Facebook, and via Android and iPhone apps. The brands behind this type of sports marketing are first movers; Google, HTC and Guinness.

Examples include the MyTracks Android app for location based and wireless monitoring (including heart rate data) of team HTC- Columbia Velostream riders in the 2010 Tour de France4, and the creation of the Guinness area 225

for Irish Rugby fans. Guinness has integrated RFID (Radio Frequency ID) chips into the Rugby balls and players jerseys used in Ireland games and use sensors around the pitch to monitor player and ball movement. Statistical information is streamed live “on-line” to fans. Area 22 is part of a huge brand po-sitioning exercise and involves apps to provide the same information on mobile devices and coordinated supporters events in pubs across the country. After trying out the technology and concept in Ireland, Guin-ness report that they aim to provide differing entry points for differing groups of fans and subsequently ex-pand the concept to other countries.

Heated Textiles. A broad range of applications have emerged using heating panels and more integrated technologies to provide garments that improve wearer comfort by provision of localised warmth. Standard products now include jackets, vests and trousers with heated panels for snowboarders, skiers and other out-door sports, ski and motorcycle gloves with heated fingers as well as heated underwear for sports and general wellness.

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The number of products in this market segment has increased dramatically over the past 3-5 years, as have the number of manufacturers. Despite an initially mixed reception, these products are now widely adopted by consumers and an annual market growth in excess of 50% is claimed by a number of manufacturers. Those companies who entered the market early are now established players; US manufacturer Gerbing6 is a good example in the motorcycling segment, as is Austrian Alpenheat7

in the outdoor sportswear segment.

Audio Entertainment. While smart garments with integrated controls for iPod and Mp3 players previ-ously attracted media attention, such solutions are no longer newsworthy. As a result, standard type solutions are beginning to emerge that existing brands can integrate as a feature in their own products.

In 2007 Marks and Spencer, Bagir and Eleksen gained considerable joint publicity from their launch of a suit jacket with integrated iPod controls, but by 2010, French sports wholesaler Decathlon, was marketing their own brand ski/snowboarding jacket with audio control features without advertising Fibretronic as the sup-plier of this technology. This is a good illustration of the way in which smart feature integration has now be-come a manufacturing, rather than marketing cost.

Fashion. A number of “demonstration” projects have been seen in this segment during 2009 and 2010, many publicity stunts with light emitting textiles. Catwalk and stage performances in garments with inte-grated LED’s have been seen repeatedly, in a variety of designs, manufactured by various companies and designers. Swiss textile manufacturer Forster Rohner8 and Danish design company Diffus9

UK based CuteCircuit

teamed up and used the 2009 COP15 UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen as a platform for showing an innova-tive dress with embroidered LED lighting.

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In the mean time, CuteCircuit are already marketing a T-shirt with integrated LED technology to consumers via their on-line web-shop. The T-shirt which retails at £80 GBP claims to be hand washable with batteries removed. Cheaper versions with LED technology attached via a Velcro-backed patch that can be removed for washing are manufactured in China as no-name products that can be branded by retailers (Global Sources Chinese suppliers offer a variety of options). Trade prices for these items vary between $1-7.4 USD.

, who describe themselves both as a wearable technology and fashion company, are perhaps one of the most prolific/successful in this area having designed dresses for pop singers Katy Perry and Safura. The dress worn by Katy Perry was embroidered with 24,000 full-colour LED lights run off iPod batteries. These garments not only attracted much media attention, but most interestingly, were reported to be commercially available in a limited version from Selfridges of London at a price of £1,350 from Septem-ber 2010. It has not been possible to find details of numbers manufactured or dress sales, but with the current maturity of the technology, commercial sale of a garment with embroidered LED lights is extremely ambi-tious, especially with issues of robustness and washability in mind. There are some indications that commer-cial launch may have been delayed, with Selfridges sending out a press release promising the dress on sale for Christmas 2010.

Light Emitting Textiles. Much research is still to be done to solve issues of robustness, seamless integra-tion and not least washability. The EU funded FP7 Place-it project (Platform for Large Area Conformable Electronics by InTegration11), led by Dutch electronics giant Philips, focuses on true integration of LED technology with flexible, stretchable and textile substrates. Likewise, the FP7 PASTA (Integrating Platform for Advanced Smart Textile Applications12) project, which focus is new methods of electronic packaging and module interconnects to increase the robustness of integration by development of stretchable interposers to provide strain relief between components and fabrics and to develop commercially feasible interconnect technologies. Both projects are indicative of the broad consensus that these issues are critical to the feasibil-ity of commercial manufacture and widespread consumer adoption.

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However technology is beginning to already emerge onto the accessories market (a wide variety of cushions and drapes/curtains are commercially available), where the challenges of washability can often be avoided.

Military and defence applications. Expectations are often that the defence industry is ahead of the field in utilising research developments in smart textiles. A number of prestigious demonstration projects have been launched across the globe to utilise developments in coatings and material properties as well as exploit opportunities for integration of electronics and communications equipment in military uniforms.

The US military has been exploring opportunities for exploitation of smart textile technologies at the NATIK Soldier Systems Center through the Future Force Warrior program since at least 2006. This demonstration project seeks to combine on-board computer systems, communications, and wearable power sources with enhanced soldier protection technologies (bullet protection).

A similar concept, but on a commercial basis, is the FELIN system which is currently under development in a second version by French Sagem Defence Solutions (together with Thales and EADS). FELIN is a dra-matically modernised combat suit with integrated rechargeable battery technology and the possibility to at-tach and run a range of electronics devices including weapon sights and radios. Weight is ergonomically po-sitioned and the integrated communications reduces the burden of additional equipment as well as providing direct information to command staff. The system has already undergone extensive trials and its operational debut is expected in 2011 or early 2012.

In 2010 the South Korean army reported a project to exploit smart textile technologies for military uniforms, and a similar project was announced in the UK.13

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Market drivers Olympic games 2012. Within the world of sport, there is an infinite need for improved athletic perform-ance. Technological developments in physiological monitoring and motion supervision are expected to be exploited to facilitate new training tools allowing athletes and trainers to evaluate the efficiency of training programmes and fine tune them to optimise performance.

The last two Olympic Games have also seen exploitation of new materials to dramatically enhance sports achievements. Examples are the British Olympic cycling teams bodysuit designed to reduce air drag and the controversial Speedo LZR and Arena Powerskin technologies which are claimed to have at least part of the responsibility for the more than 50 Olympic swimming records broken in Beijing.

An out of lab motion sensor with real-time bio-feedback dedicated to shot put, javelin, rowing or high jump is be expected to be a sensational tool for athletes during training and even competition.

Ageing population / healthcare trends. Chronic conditions and diseases are the leading cause of mor-tality. In Europe chronic disease management currently accounts for 60% of all public health spending14 (Source: Frost & Sullivan 2010) while in the US this figure is at least 75%15

One area expected to expand dramatically is in truly wearable physiologi-cal monitoring and home care in order to reduce and shorten hospital ad-missions and care needs. The European Commission ICT for Health Unit report on “Business Models for eHealth” (28 February 2010) estimated the European eHealth market at EUR14.269 million in 2008 and pro-jected that it will reach EUR15.619 million by 2012 with the market for personalised health and disease management services such as remote pa-tient monitoring, telecare etc. predicted to have a compound annual growth of 61.4% between 2008-2012

. The demographic shift towards an older population means that there is a declining working population to pay for public health care and con-siderable pressure to develop alternative systems that will allow standards of healthcare to remain high while reducing costs dramatically.

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Thus far, the number of telecare solutions implemented has been extremely limited (The ICT for Health Unit reported the telemedicine market as just 0.9% of the total eHealth market in 2008), with most as pilot studies only. This may in part be due to a lack of standards, but could also indicate that adoption of this technology may take some time, with successful solutions requiring long term investment before returns (reduced hospi-talisation, better medication management, improved patient quality of life, reduced staffing and transport costs etc.) can be realised.

.

Companies involved in development of wearable monitoring technologies include:

• Equivital17

• Zephyr Technology Corporation

– LifeMonitor (FDA and CE approved for health monitoring) 18

– BioHarness BT (FDA approved)

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Publically (EU, NASA / ESA) funded research and development. A number of SFIT research projects have already been funded within the EU FP6 and FP7 programmes with the aim of revitalising the European textile industry and increasing competitiveness through high-tech innovation rather than see jobs lost to low cost manufacturing in Asia and the Developing world. NASA, and its European counterpart ESA, are also extensively in-volved in exploiting and maturing the latest wearable technologies. Until 2010 NASA had planned development of a new “Constellation space suit”, which would potentially combine many of the most advanced wearable tech-nologies, although that was put on hold indefinitely by the Obama admini-stration in response to the economic crisis.

Inhibitors The recent economic crisis led to greater caution amongst investors in the course of 2009. While some optimism appears to have returned in 2010, larger investments in smart textiles products have primarily been seen amongst well consolidated brands; Nike, Adidas and Polar amongst sports brands and Viking Life-Saving Equipment in PPE.

Lack of standards. No standards for smart textiles currently exist, although the need for standards in this field is widely recognised if consumers are not to be disappointed by the immaturity of some technologies which are currently underway. A European task group (CEN/TC 248) led by Belgian CentexBel was estab-lished in 2006, to look at issues of performance and testing, compliance with legal requirements and how to ensure that new risks are not introduced, although a set of standards based on this work has yet to be intro-duced.

Research Focus Research focus in SFIT has gradually shifted from sensing technologies in projects like MyHeart, Wealthy, BioTex and Context towards integration issues in projects such as Stella (stretchable electronics), Place-It (interconnects and integration of OLEDs) and PASTA (increasing the robustness and commercial maturity of integrated systems) with future focus expected to look at power supply needs for autonomous systems.

Power Consumption. Research groups like those at CSEM in Switzerland, IMEC in Belgium and TNO at the Holst centre in Holland are focussing on achievement of autonomous or ultra-low power consumption sensor technologies for body area network applications. A number of applications of this type have been demonstrated including an ECG monitoring shirt and a pulse oximeter powered by dissipated body heat at IMEC.

Although sensors typically have a very low data rate and most often a unidirectional data flow, where data is sent to a base station with a less limited power supply, reduction of energy consumption for wireless trans-missions is still a key issue for energy autonomous systems, with the current state-of-the-art at around 20nJ/bit.

Power Sources. Wearable applications with integrated electronic functions typically use batteries as a power source. These applications can already be designed to have very limited power consumption, but ex-isting battery technologies are often bulky, relatively weighty and lack flexibility in relation to the soft drape

Image Credit: NASA.

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of materials used in wearable applications. Since the rationale for integration of these functions into a gar-ment is often that they are always at hand and never forgotten, then ideally the power supply should also be seamlessly integrated as part of the product, without the need for human intervention to recharge or change batteries (energy autonomous systems).

The desire for autonomous self-powered systems has led to considerable research into systems that harvest or scavenge energy from the garments wearer. Human energy is primarily stored as fat (other energy forms are very limited) and is first available for harvesting during metabolism when it is converted into heat and movement. On average, muscles convert just 25% of chemical energy to mechanical movement, while the remaining 75% is dissipated as heat. As a result, potential energy which can be harvested using piezo elec-tronic or mechanical technologies is extremely limited.

Despite this, the primary focus of research activities has been on technologies for harvesting mechanical en-ergy. In Europe, research on several fronts has been driven by projects within the EU 6th and 7th Framework programmes: In 2007, the 6th Framework project, Vibration Energy Scavenging (‘VIBES’19 ), demonstrated a piezoelectric micro-generator and the current E-Stars20

While design of entirely energy autonomous integrated systems is not likely with existing technologies, re-searchers expect emergence of technologies that will make this possible within the next10 years. The CATRENE report of 2009

project (2008-2011) aims to develop an autonomous smart micro system with sensing and communication capability powered by an integrated 3D high capacity micro battery based upon exploitation of the latest deposition processes for micro layers. The 2009 FP7 ICT call, called in topic 3.9 for projects to develop autonomous energy efficient smart systems and smart fabrics, although no smart textile projects were selected.

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concludes that while output from current harvesting technologies may be lim-ited, the continual decrease of energy demanded by electronic systems and the increase of the energy stored and/or harvested by the generation systems is reducing the gap between needs and potential supplies so that use of intermediate storage and smart power management strategies can bring development of autonomous systems within reach.

Piezo electronics. In principle, mechanical energy may be harvested from any human movement, whether generated by muscles or gravity. Demonstrated examples include torque driven generators at the joints, ac-celeration driven devices at the limbs, force or torque (rubbing or bending) driven embedded fibres, force driven "switches" in the soles of shoes or boots and force driven devices harvesting chest expansion during inspiration (Starner, 199622

Focus for many wearable technologies is on size, and although developments in MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) technology have made it possible to reduce mechanical generator units to a size that makes their integration in smart garments feasible

).

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, their very small size also means that mechanical moving elements are limited in weight and movement and as a result operate at relatively high resonance frequencies (10 kHz) while human movements have a typical frequency of maximum 10Hz. Perhaps as a result of this, demonstrated devices using electrostatic, piezoelectric and electromagnetic principles, report outputs be-tween 60µW (with a mass of 2g @ 571 Hz a device of 0.2 cm2 is possible) and 300 μW for even the most efficient devices (CATRENE report 2009).

Thermal harvesting. Since muscles are relatively inefficient converters of chemical to mechanical energy, a substantial amount of energy used during physical activity is released as heat. The process involved in scavenging energy from heat is based upon the Seebeck effect which defines output voltage as proportional to the temperature difference between two materials. Since differences in body temperature are limited, out-put voltages of 25 - 50mV are typical using a 10cm2 thermal harvester. Body-worn applications thus far have shown ultra-low output voltages in the region of 10’s of milli-volts and the horizon for commercially mature and viable technologies is distant.

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Solar cells. Solar cells are the preferred devices to achieve power autonomy in consumer products. Since printing technologies are not yet robust enough to withstand direct print onto textile media or to withstand folding or laundry in wearable applications, current solutions are generally foil based technologies “at-tached” to a wearable or textile substrate. Companies like German Interactive Wear offer such a “standard” solution based upon commercially available flexible cells for integration onto garments and accessories.

Outside the wearable segment, solar cells mounted on textile substrates are widely available as rollable and lightweight solar chargers for mobile phones and other consumer electronic devices. Tents for the military and for humanitarian aid projects are also emerging commercially, as are sunshade solutions with solar cells mounted on architectural fabrics. The greatest challenges are still with surface coatings, but this is also where much research effort is currently focussed, with potentially greatly increased cell lifetimes and robustness once this is solved.

In the mean time accessories such as bags, which don’t have the same needs for laundering, are widely avail-able with integrated solar charging for the mid range consumer market. More recently, well-known designers and brands such as Samsonite have launched bags with solar chargers in their range.

Batteries and storage technologies. Intermediate energy storage is necessary for most energy harvest-ing concepts, including solar power, due to the varying availability of ambient energy and the power needs of micro-devices. In most cases however, intermediate storage is via a secondary micro battery and use of dy-namic power management strategies.

With the recent introduction of the ‘printable battery’ (typically low-power lithium batteries using thin-film deposition techniques), requirements to size (0.01-0.5mm thick), weight and flexibility are being reached, although this technology is currently still limited to a ‘patch’ type attachment process and is unlikely to sur-vive being printed directly onto a flexible woven or knitted structure24

. Energy storage capabilities for state of the art thin film batteries are currently in the region of 200Wh/litre.

References [1] http://www.viking-life.com/viking.nsf [2] http://www.globefiresuits.com/globe/whats-new/ [3] http://www.raesystems.com/products/lifeshirt [4] http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/mytrackstour/ [5] http://www.contagiousmagazine.com/2010/01/guinness_7.php [6] http://gerbing.com/ [7] http://www.alpenheat.com/ [8] http://www.forsterrohner.ch/index.php?id=4&L=1 [9] http://www.diffus.dk/

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[10] http://www.cutecircuit.com/ [11] http://www.place-it-project.eu/ [12] http://www.pasta-project.eu/ [13] http://www.plusplasticelectronics.com/SmartFabTextiles/South-Korea-backs-military-smart-textiles-11752.aspx [14] http://www.hhmglobal.com/knowledge-bank/articles/health-spending-projections-through-2015-changes-on-the-horizon [15] http://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/resources/publications/AAG/chronic.htm [16] http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/health/docs/studies/business_model/business_models_eHealth_report.pdf [17] http://www.equivital.co.uk/ [18] http://www.zephyr-technology.com/products/bioharness-bt [19] http://www.vibes.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ [20] http://ww.estars-project.org/scripts/home/publigen/content/templates/show.asp?L=EN&P=55&vTicker=alleza [21] Bellevill M., Cantatore E., Fanet H., Fiorini P., Nicole P., Pelgrom M., Piguet C., Hahn R.,Van Hoof C., Vullers R., Tartagni M.: CATRENE Scientific Committee White Paper 'Energy Autono-mous Systems: Future Trends in Devices, Technology, and Systems' (August 2009) http://www2.imec.be/content/user/File/EAS_report_v28.pdf [22] Starner T. 'Human-powered wearable computing'. IBM Systems Journal, 35, 1996. [23] R. Elfrink, T. M. Kamel, M. Goedbloed, S. Matova, D. Hohlfeld, R. van Schaijk, R. Vullers 'Vibra-tion Energy Harvesting With Aluminum Nitride‐Based Piezoelectric Devices' Proc. of the PowerMEMS Int. Workshop, Sendai, Nov 10‐11 2008, pp 249 – 252. [24] Southee, D.J. Hay, G.I., Evans, P.E. Harrison, D.J. 'Lithographically printed voltaic cells – a feasibility study', Circuit World Vol 3 Issue 1, pp 31-35.