Smart Clothing
STW-RTD project
Goals of the project
In this project we will develop new and innovative solutions for clothing which can actively control our body temperature. This will not only give us more comfort in hot or cold environments but is also intended for professional users which are exposed to extreme conditions for a longer time and still have to perform within the safety limits, for sportsmen striving to improve their performance and for patients requiring cooling of specific body parts.
We will do this by combining different heating and cooling technologies with sensors and actuators and integrating those in new smart clothing prototypes. The details of the design of actual clothing products using these smart technologies depend on parameters like the body size, expected activity and expected external conditions and are therefore different for each application. In order to speed up this design process, we will also develop a tool (a thermal model) for designing thermoregulating clothing. This model will be tested using the prototypes developed during the project.
