E-textiles Network

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The UK's textiles and clothing industry makes a significant contribution to the economy employing over 130,000 individuals and is experiencing resurgence with production rising by 2.5% over the last two years to a value of £9.1 billion. E-textiles are an emerging and enabling technology with broad potential applications in many areas such as clothing, home furnishing, workwear, sports, medical, architecture and automotive. The e-textiles market is forecast to grow from $100 million to $5 billion by 2027. E-textiles can also be used in many other emerging areas such as wearable technologies and IoT. This proposal is to create an E-textiles Network community to bring academia, industry and end users together to identify research challenges and catalyst the collaboration to address these challenges. The e-textiles network will ensure widely dissemination and knowledge exchanges using variety of mechanisms. In particular, the annual two-day conference will bring the community together to disseminate the research findings and engage with industry and end users. While network will be co-ordinated by the University of Southampton, the priorities and activities will be driven by a steering board with balanced representation from a range of other universities, companies, end users and policy makers. The success of the proposed network will ensure the UK keeps its leading role in the innovation and manufacturing of e-textiles.