E-textiles Network

英国的纺织品和服装业为经济做出了重大贡献，雇用了13万多人，并正在经历复苏，在过去两年中产量增长了2.5%，价值达到91亿英镑。电子纺织品是一种新兴的技术，在服装、家居、工作服、运动、医疗、建筑和汽车等许多领域具有广泛的潜在应用。预计到2027年，电子纺织品市场将从1亿美元增长到50亿美元。电子纺织品还可以用于许多其他新兴领域，如可穿戴技术和物联网。该提案旨在创建一个电子纺织品网络社区，将学术界，工业界和最终用户聚集在一起，以确定研究挑战并促进合作以应对这些挑战。电子纺织品网络将利用各种机制确保广泛传播和知识交流。特别是，为期两天的年度会议将使社区聚集在一起，传播研究成果，并与行业和最终用户接触。虽然网络将由南安普顿大学协调，但优先事项和活动将由一个指导委员会推动，该委员会由一系列其他大学，公司，最终用户和政策制定者的平衡代表组成。该网络的成功将确保英国在电子纺织品的创新和制造方面保持领先地位。

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.