Oct 17 2014
AITEX is developing technical textiles to act as antennas that harvest energy from RF fields. This energy is used by Farsens RFID chip to drive embedded sensors such as those monitoring temperature or heartbeat.
AITEX energy harvesting technical textile with an embedded RFID sensor
Spanish non-profit association AITEX (Textile Industry Research Association) is working on a new family of intelligent clothes that will feature embedded autonomous sensors. The association is researching flexible antennas built into textiles that will harvest energy to power up devices embedded in clothes.
Current development of this maintenance-free and intelligent clothing is based on temperature and movement detection sensors but ‘future solutions could monitor the user’s heartbeat or breathing for sports and healthcare applications’ says Josue Ferri, Information and Communication Technologies Projects Technician in AITEX.
AITEX has already developed temperature, heartbeat and breathing monitoring solutions based on Bluetooth technology but these devices need to be smaller and the battery life for the sensors is shorter than desired. For this reason AITEX has started to look at passive electronics that can be embedded into textiles. This is ideal for medical and sport applications where both user comfort and zero-maintenance of the electronics are important factors.
The technical development allows the introduction of battery-free technology into the clothing with flexible textile antennas. Textile materials are being designed to harness energy from different sources. By leveraging their expertise on RFID technology – which is becoming a trend in retail - and the experience acquired running different R&D projects on textile materials AITEX is manufacturing clothes to harness energy form RF fields.
In order to embed the desired sensors without requiring batteries, AITEX is using Farsens’s ANDY100 RFID chip. The energy harvested by the textile is then used by the chip to manage sensors and wirelessly send data back to the system.
AITEX has worked on these developments as part of the AMBIENTEX project in conjunction with AIDO (Technological Institute of Optics, Colour and Imaging) and supported by the Conselleria d’ Economia, Indústria, Turisme I Ocupació de la Generalitat Valenciana through IVACE, and is co-financed by EU FEDER funding: reference IMDEEA/2012/71. For more information go to the project website at http://ambientex.aitex.es.
AITEX is a private non-profit association that encompasses textile and textile-related companies. Its ultimate aim is to make this sector more competitive. To achieve this, the Institute promotes modernization and the introduction of new and emerging technologies by developing R&D projects and, in general, any initiatives that will contribute to the industrial progress of the sector.
Farsens designs and manufactures full passive RFID sensor solutions. Their proprietary UHF RFID IC allows Farsens to develop long range solutions for asset tracking – via the unique ID – and monitoring – via the attached sensor – without the need for any batteries on the tag.
CONTACT INFO
Company: AITEX
Country: Spain (SP)
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +34 96 554 22 00
Fax: +34 96 291 20 81
URL: http://www.aitex.es