Smart Protective Clothing for Law Enforcement Personnel

Abstract

Smart protective clothing is a promising niche for innovative products with great potentials on the textile and apparel market. Generally, smart textiles are defined as textile products with integrated, additional functions. These functions provide solutions for a wide variety of applications such as healthcare, sports, protective clothing and the automotive industry. Smart protective clothing offers many possibilities to increase the safety of operations and reduce casualties. However, the integration of smart functions into protective clothing provides many challenges. The functions need to be fully integrated into the protective clothing, so that they do not result in a weakening of the armour. The main goal of the European research project SmartPro is the development of lightweight and flexible protective clothing for security personnel with integrated smart functionalities. These include heart rate sensors, a damage control system and a geolocalisation module as well as wireless data transfer by means of textile antennas.