Intelligent Textiles for the digital soldier

Another highly interesting company I have visited during the TechTextile is ITL (Intelligent Textiles Limited) a UK based research and development company founded in 2002 specialized in the weaving of complex electrical circuits in conductive fabrics.

Starting in the traditional application areas of consumer apparel (eg. wearable music player and phone controllers), healthcare (eg. biomonitoring) and flexible heating (eg. heated gloves), the company has recently become a specialist in the defence and first-responder arenas with the development of fabric personal-area-networks that reduce the burden of conventional power cables and data connections in digital soldier systems.

ITL has three basic lines of solutions: ‘detect’, a e-textile sensors for input functions like remote controls or keyboards, ‘heat’ to integrate low voltage heating elements into woven fabric and ‘connect’, a damage tolerant, e-textile based connection network between other e-textile components in a wearable electronic system.

ITL’s e-Textile components are made by integrating a grid of electrically conductive yarn during the weaving process, allowing a large scale, cost efficient yet highly durable e-textile fabric production.

The weaving process offers the high potential of lower production costs leading to a potentially lower component cost for e-textile systems.

e-Textile solutions like ITL is offering make life easier for the professionals and will help to pave the way for more durable solutions to become available for the consumer market.

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