Smart Textiles and Wearable Technologies for Sportswear: A Design approach.

Currently there is a great inclination to modify sport and well-being concept by changing the technology in wearable especially thanks to the huge development of technologies in the field of smart textiles. Textiles of today are materials with applications in almost all our activities. Fibres, yarns, fabric and other structures with added-value functionality have been developed for a range of applications textile materials and the textile has become an important platform for high-tech innovations. Smart Textile creates textile products that interact by combining smart materials and integrated computing power into textile applications. The introduction of smart materials and computing technology in textile structures offers an opportunity to develop textiles with a new type of behavior and functionality. Smart Textile and computing technology are introducing a shift in textile, from a passive to a dynamic behavior, from textiles with static functionalities to products that exhibit dynamic functionalities. This work will describe the results of an educational activity carried out inside the Sportswear Studio Lab of Master Degree in Fashion Study at School of Design of Politecnico di Milano. The students were asked to generate a new advanced concept for sport application exploiting the potentiality of smart textile and wearable technology. The projects developed by the students followed a design approach suggested by the author that requires the understanding of: (i) the what (the purpose of the concept); (ii) the how (the used technology); (iii) the where (the context in which the product is used) and finally (iv) the wearability issues connected to the role of technology in human body changing and perception

Wearable Technology as a Tool to Motivate Health Behaviour: A Case Study

According to the Scientific Committee on Occupational Exposure Limits, work-related exposures are estimated to account for about 15% of all adult respiratory diseases. Today, the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) is the only way for workers to prevent disease. Nevertheless, its use is highly sparse. Currently, products and systems embedded with wearable technologies are able to protect, motivate and educate users. The authors then suggested the development of a novel wearable system following the beliefs that wearable technology can be persuasive and elicit a conscious behaviour towards the use of the PPEs by consequently improving their health condition. The authors here describe the result of a Transnational Research Project named “P_O_D Plurisensorial Device to prevent Occupational Disease.” The chapter describes the findings achieved so far, the research phase and the new wearable system conceived as a possible example of how to use wearable technology as a useful tool to influence behavioural change

Piani di cottura (parte di -)

Il progetto M-Stekio si è basato sullo sfruttamento dei brevetti d’invenzione di 3P Engineering. Tali brevetti consentono di ottenere un bruciatore a gas caratterizzato da: ingombri ridotti, maggior efficienza energetica, aumento della sicurezza, riduzione del consumo di gas, dei tempi di cottura e delle emissioni nocive. Poiché la novità tecnologica del prodotto è ciò che maggiormente lo caratterizza, i designer che hanno lavorato al progetto sono docenti del Politecnico, con ottime competenze dal punto di vista della tecnologia (di prodotto e di processo) e dell’ingegnerizzazione. Questo ha consentito al gruppo di ricerca di lavorare fianco a fianco con gli ingegneri di 3P Engineering, mantenendo ognuno le proprie specifiche competenze