Footfalls & Heartbeats, the UK-based smart textiles manufacturer, has been selected to receive funding from the EC through the European Smart Textile Accelerator programme. The collaborative project will focus on developing the company’s innovative motion tracking knee sleeve technology known as KiTT.
The knitted KiTT textiles are designed to sit over the knee, tracking the joint directly and offering advanced data and insight in a comfortable and wearable knee sleeve. The main target markets are health/wellbeing and sports/fitness markets, where Footfalls & Heartbeats sees the product helping patients with injury rehabilitation and physiotherapy as well as helping monitor athletes during activities.
The project will also enable further innovation and collaboration with European SMEs. As part of our product development, Footfalls & Heartbeats will be collaborating with Revolve, a software developer agency based in Poland, on app development and maintenance. It will also be collaborating with Ioetec – an internet of things security firm based in the UK, on security, hardware and electronics development.
Welcoming the funding, Simon McMaster, Founder and CSO of Footfalls & Heartbeats, highlighted how the company is producing state-of-the-art textile technology to assist remote physiological monitoring in many sectors. “The SmartX funding will allow the team to use our motto – ‘Be bold, be brave, have fun and change the world’ to speed up the democratization of healthcare,” he said. “We are thrilled and grateful to receive the support and funding from SmartX, and are looking forward to getting started on our project.”
The SmartX accelerator programme focuses on plugging the gap between smart textile prototypes and growing market interest for smart textiles. The program will fund and support 40 pioneering SME projects across Europe, aiming to help firms develop the novel industrial chains and technology required for the smart textile industry to grow. The chosen projects are selected by a team of international experts in their fields. The projects receive coaching and support throughout the entire process, from project realisation to results exploitation.
Proprietary: Using some of the latest knitting technology available on the market, such as Santoni’s X machine, Footfalls & Heartbeats has developed a number of series of proprietary processes for manufacturing smart knitted fabrics to measure, in real-time, compressive and tensile force. The technology combines mathematically determined textile structures using electrically conductive yarn to form a repeatable and robust sensor network. The technology uses the three-dimensional complexity of a textile structure, including interactions of fibres within the yarn itself, to control the electrical resistance characteristics of the sensor structure.
These textile sensor structures, says the company, are capable of registering external environmental stimuli in the form of electrical signals. Therefore, unlike its competitors’ products, in which solid-state sensing systems are embedded within their fabrics, FHL offers a solution whereby “the textile is the sensor”. The signals obtained from the textile can be filtered, amplified, analysed or stored in real-time to produce multiple data sets relating to physiological output. This heralds the emergence of the next generation of smart textiles where sensor functionality is integrated into the fabric structure for real-time monitoring whilst ensuring comfort, personal privacy, wear ability and durability.
