Citizens' Campus: Smart textiles? - How small sensors can help you stay healthy

With the ongoing development and miniaturization of all kinds of sensors, new possibilities are constantly emerging for integrating them into fabrics or garments and thus creating innovative products. Such so-called smart clothes equipped with electronic devices or functions will change our everyday life in the future.

In this presentation, the development of an intelligent T-shirt for monitoring the movement of the spine at the Biomechatronics Group at TU Ilmenau will be recounted. With this, a student team was able to win the Competition of Students in Microsystems Applications from the Association of Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies in 2022. From the idea to the biomechanical and technical basics to the realization of a prototype, the challenges and opportunities in the development of such systems are shown.

Speaker Dipl.-Ing. Thomas Helbig guided and accompanied the project as university supervisor of the students. He has many years of experience in the partly biologically inspired development of technical systems for biology and/or medicine.