The second edition of the Smart Textiles Salon, an initiative from the University of Ghent, Belgium and Systex, is well under way and accepting project submissions until March 15th.

Your project prototype should fit in the scope of the exhibition being textile based or compatible with intelligent textile systems.

Documents must be written in English with high resolution (300dpi) image resolution to Judith.Kenis@UGent.be The template for submission can be found on the Smart Textiles Salon website.

STS has only space for a maximum of 20 prototypes therefore a jury will select the projects and notify the participants end of March 2011.

Open up your eTextile treasure chest and submit your smart textile idea – cool prizes will await the winners and the opportunity to show your creation a high profile audience during the Smart Textiles Salon event on 21 April 2011 in Ghent.

For the second time SYSTEX and the Ghent University called students around the world for smart textile designs and to select the yearly champion.

The 2010 winning entry is the Active Belt by Kunal Mankodiya from the Institute for Signal Processing, University of Lübeck, Germany.

Active Belt, the award winning project, investigates the longtime use of yarn based, woven fabric electrodes. To check their accuracy and reliability over time. Besides textile based electrodes the system design, signal processing and transmitting in an miniaturized, robust design is as important to be suitable as truly wearable solution.

ECG monitoring becomes one of the most important topics as more people reach higher age but also more people develop sometimes serious heart problems based on our stressful lifestyle. Monitoring the heart condition over longer time periods can significantly reduce further detonation of heart problems at an early stage.

Kunal Mankodiya’s work looks like to be a big step forward towards reliable and wearable heart monitoring integrated into clothing making discrete observation of our body without looking like being on a life extending machine.

Congrats to Kunal Mankodiya for his well deserved SYSTEX Smart Textiles Student Award which he will formally receive during the Smart Textiles Salon in Spring 2011 (place and time are not yet fixed).

Over the coming days we will introduce the other project submission for this award, highly interesting projects among them – stay tuned for more.

Another reminder from the wearable technology event calendar: the ‘Smart Textiles Salon 2010‘ which will take place this year on October 18th in Dresden, Germany.

Remember our extensive coverage of the Smart Textiles Salon 2009? This event attracted many highly interesting projects, some of them publicly shown for the first time.

This year’s event promises to be as exiting as lasts years event. To ensure everyone can showcase his/her latest creation around Smart Textiles and wearable technologies the call is out for submission of demonstrators and prototypes.

To register your demonstrator or prototype you need to complete this application form (link points to a MS Word document) and send the completed form via e-mail to: Lina.Rambausek@UGent.be

The submission dateline is September 17th and the selected contributions will be notified latest by September 21st.

All these and more details can be found on the Systex Website.

The Smart Textiles Salon is, like last year, organized by the EU initiative SYSTEX and by Ghent University.

We will bring you affair an extensive coverage of the projects and the event. Stay tuned for regular and frequent updates from the Smart Textiles Salon on talk2myShirt.

SYSTEX in connection with Ghent University – Department of Textiles is inviting the wearable electronic community to submit projects for this years SYSTEX Student Award 2010 and Smart-Textiles-Salon 2010.

Our extensive coverage about the SYSTEX Student Award 2009 may serve as inspirational source and motivation to participate in this years event.

Last years winner was Laura Wilson with her project the ‘Celestial Hybrid’.

To participate in the SYSTEX Student Award 2010 is easy: send a report about your project together with a your CV by email to Lieva.VanLangenhove@UGent.be with cc to: Lina.Rambausek@UGent.be or snail-mail the documents to the address indicated on the SYSTEX Student Award 2010 Website.

The deadline for submitting your project is June 30th 2010, still some time to formalize your great idea around smart textiles.

For more information click over to SYSTEX Student Award 2010 or check out the leaflet (link to .pdf document).

Your project, if selected will have the chance to be presented at the Smart Textiles Salon in autumn 2010.

Today is not only the day wearable electronic experts and enthusiasts meet at the Smart Textile Salon in Ghent, Belgium but also the day where Laura Wilson will present her SysTex Student Award 2009 winning project, the ‘Celestial Hybrid’.

Laura Wilson, currently completing her final year of her degree in Printed Textiles, Fashion and Fibre at Winchester School of Art has a very unique approach to intelligent, technology enabled textiles.

Her aim is to use technology to enhance textiles by giving them properties to follow the desire of change to adapt and adjust to various stimuli in our society.

For Laura, our trend obsessed ‘fast fashion’ culture, like most parts of today’s lifestyle, generates mountains of ‘outdated’ products. On the other hand, change, the fluidity of life encourages the disposability, even implies the acceptance of such practice.

In the search for a sensible balance between consumerism and the need of sustainability, Laura started to explore the benefits wearable technologies can offer to create changeable, upgradeable, adaptive textiles.

Her aim is to create adaptive textiles that adjust with time and climate to meet the needs of different people in different societies, to create clothing people can update rather than replace.

Laura is placing a high priority to the aesthetic appearance of her technology enabled textiles but at the same time takes great care to create smart textiles that can become ‘usable’ and ‘affordable’ in the near future.

The use of conductive yarns, LEDs, optical fibers, Thermochromatic and Photochromatic paints on textile structures merge into living, changing, transforming, color shifting surfaces which adapt constantly in sync with the wearers movement, action and journey through life.

I am sure we will hear more from Laura’s  ‘Celestial’ explorations into smart textiles and clothing in the years ahead.

EMPA – an interdisciplinary research and services institution for material sciences and technology development within the ETH Domain will present this Friday at the Smart Textiles Salon in Ghent, the ‘Conducting textile platform based on novel e-fibers’.

There are different technologies and processes to create electrical conductive fibers and yarns, some use fine silver wires spun together with polyester yarn, some coat polyester yarn with a metal layer and others coat woven textiles with metals to make them electrically conductive.

The research team at EMPA uses a low-pressure plasma sputtering process to coat a 100-200 nm thick metal layer on common monofil- or multifil- yarns.

This process does not change the properties of the fibers base material but make them reliably conductive for low-current signals such as audio signals, computer interfaces (e.g. USB) or low current supply. The typical resistance they can achieve is 5 to 50 Ohms per cm.

The aim of the EMPA project is to create electrically conductive fibers useable for e-Textiles which do behave and perform like any conventional textile, are as robust and resistant as conventional textiles but are capable to be used as interconnection platform for technology enabled clothing.

The magic of illuminating textiles seems to be one of the focus points during the upcoming Smart Textiles Salon in Ghent, the jointed European workshop organized by the European projects SysTex and Proetex.

Spain based technology center Cetemmsa, with over 18 years of experience in carrying out applied research on smart materials will present their textile illumination technology in form of an European flag swaying in the wind so show the softness, the flexibility their technology can provide to textile display like products of the future.

The flag is made of a polyamide textile support coated with different layers of organic and inorganic materials of dielectric, light emitting and conductive properties, creating a soft, flexible textile display which can be bend, folded, crumpled and even torn.

The electroluminescent flag is mounted on a flag pole which contains the battery and the electronic to power the flag.

Sounds very exiting and offers a wide range of applications, starting as display on clothing, making it possible to use more of the iPod shuffle, display less devices. Other application areas include interior design and the wide field of magical outdoor advertisement and event decoration.

Visitors to the Smart Textiles Salon in Ghent, a jointed European workshop organized by the European projects SysTex and Proetex will see a highly interesting prototype called ‘Transitional Stripes‘, a technology exploration into color changing textiles.

The ‘Transitional Stripes‘ are the result of an AHRC funded project by Robert M Christie, Sarah Taylor and presented by Sara Robertson, PhD student at the Heriot-Watt University School of Textiles and Design.

The prototype uses laser etching and printing with liquid crystal dyes on textile. A programmable heat-profiling electronic system activates the liquid crystal layers, cycling through a variety of colors by selectively change the temperature of the different liquid crystal layers.

The colors of the different bands of textiles are activated at different temperatures starting at 25°C with a pale green color shade, blending into emerald green then lilac and turquoise.

With rising temperature the textile changes color through purple, pink and tops off with emerald green at 40°C.

Thermochromic dyes and pigments can be found in a variety of products and garments. Color changing T-Shirts have been in high demand a few years back at the begin of the ’90s, reacting on the change of the surrounding temperature but only controllable when the wearer changes from a cooler to warmer room (or the other way around).

Merging temperature sensitive, liquid crystal dyes with electronics to control the color change ‘on demand’ adds more interactivity to textiles, allowing to change the appearance of clothing or other textile surfaces. A cool technology I am sure many designer will like to use.

Infos about the prototypes on stage during the Smart Textiles Salon keep coming thanks to our friends Lina Rambausek and Anne Schwarz who are busy to organize this event under the supervision of Prof. Lieva Van Langenhove at UGent.

Today’s project preview presents another approach to smart textile sensors based on silver-coated polyamide yarn knitted with spandex to make it stretchable. The projects name is ITcares – ‘Intelligent Textile for CArdio REspiratory Sensing’.

The textile sensor patches are placed on positions of the T-Shirt’s inside which have been found to be most immune to the movement of the torso which will minimizing the ‘artifacts’, wrong readings of the sensor.

Stretchable textile sensors allow a tight but still comfortable fit, contributing to an improved sensor performance as skin contact is most important for accurate biometric data detection.

Body sensor network techniques gaining tremendous interest from researchers and professionals and from academia to the industry worldwide. With the development of innovative wearable/wireless and one day implantable bio sensors, everyday health care and the improvement in the quality of life for patients is one of the most valuable achievements wearable technologies are able to deliver.

We have added a category specific for the Smart Textile Salon entries for the convenience to have all related Smart Textiles Salon articles with one mouse click or via the Category panel.

OFSETH (Optical Fiber Sensors Embedded into technical Textile for Health-care) is a European project of the 6th Framework Program and will be part of the Smart Textiles Salon prototype presentation in Ghent, a European workshop jointly organized by the European projects SysTex and Proetex.

The OFSETH project aims to develop optical fiber based sensors for health care application to continuously monitor vital biometric data of patients while giving them at the same time more mobility and freedom, to be more mobile.

I really like the idea of having, hopefully one day soon, smart patients care garments that take out one of the most frustrating experiences when one has to submit to body monitoring.

The team created a optical sensor network into a harness for patient monitoring containing several optical fiber sensors for assessing the patient breathing activity, detecting respiratory accidents or incidents.

The optical sensor fibers will be compatible with textile manufacturing processes.

More details about this project can be found on the OFSETH project site.