Smart Textiles Tackle Wound Healing, Climate Adaptation, and Reproductive Health

Smart textiles are becoming capable of doing more than simply sensing what our bodies are doing. Asst Prof Irmandy Wicaksono, who directs the Soft Technologies Lab at the NUS Department of Design, says the next step could be clothing that responds to the wearer, providing support, stimulation or feedback when and where it is needed.
 
“I’m intrigued by moving beyond electronic applications to mechanical or fluidic applications,” he told the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), suggesting, for example, that yarn could be programmed to shrink or expand.
 
One possibility, he suggests, is smart trousers that could sense muscle condition and activity in real time, then apply precise compression or stimulation in response. This vision is explored more broadly in a recent paper published in npj Flexible Electronics, in which Asst Prof Wicaksono and his co-authors examine how advances in materials, knitting, computation and AI could transform electronic textiles into “intelligent, responsive systems that actively support human performance, rehabilitation, and interaction”.