In the broad context of Wireless Body Sensor Networks for healthcare and pervasive applications, the design of wearable antennas offers the possibility of ubiquitous monitoring, communication and energy harvesting and storage. Specific requirements for wearable antennas are a planar structure and flexible construction materials. Several properties of the materials influence the behaviour of the...

A medical quality electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is necessary for permanent monitoring, and an accurate heart examination can be obtained from instrumented underwear only if it is equipped with high-quality, flexible, textile-based electrodes guaranteeing low contact resistance with the skin. The main objective of this article is to develop reliable and washable ECG monitoring underwear able to...

This article presents a novel educational software package which develops an Interactive Didactic Application (IDA) created by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), and which contains the essentials of textile design. It is an open application which uses a database in ASCII format. The principal elements of this database are lists of whole numbers structured according to indexed colors...

Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) harness the metabolism of microorganisms, converting chemical energy into electrical energy. Anode performance is an important factor limiting the power density of MFCs for practical application. Improving the anode design is thus important for enhancing the MFC performance, but only a little development has been reported. Here, we describe a biocompatible, highly co...

The objective was to examine whether the observed excess mortality from anaemia in textile and clothing workers was associated with any specific anaemia type or occupational activity. The design was a death certificate based case-control study of textile and clothing workers who died in England and Wales in the years surrounding the decennial censuses of 1961, 1971, and 1981. The main outcome m...

Background With the expansion of the fashion industry the quantity of industrial pre-consumer textile waste has increased. It is estimated that approximately 10-20% of textiles are wasted during garment manufacture [1]. Reusing pre-consumer textile waste within the fashion supply chain offers many environmental advantages, including: · Directing waste away from landfill and incinerators · Conse...

Metallic sandwich panels with textile cores have been analyzed subject to combined bending and shear and then designed for minimum weight. Basic results for the weight benefits relative to solid plates are presented, with emphasis on restricted optimizations that assure robustness (non-catastrophic failure) and acceptable thinness. Select numerical simulations are used to check the analytical r...

Energy is one of the primary inputs in textile processing industries that have a significant impact on the cost of a cotton product. The energy cost-share is reported between 5-10% of the total production cost of woven cotton fabric in textile factories of developed countries. However, it is far higher in developing countries. This study aims to contribute to the understanding of energy use and...