U.S. Textile Industry Turns to Wearable Tech as Gateway to Revival

Warwick Mills shows the kind of innovative know-how common among American textile companies that have survived the fierce global competition of recent years.

The small private company in New Hampshire has climbed steadily up the economic ladder of its industry to produce specialized fabrics that weave in ceramics, metals and fiberglass. These high-value fabrics are used in products like safety gloves for industrial workers and body armor for the police and military.

Now, Warwick Mills is joining the Defense Department, universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and nearly 50 other companies in an ambitious $320 million project to push the American textile industry into the digital age. Key to the plan is a technical ingredient: embedding a variety of tiny semiconductors and sensors into fabrics that can see, hear, communicate, store energy, warm or cool a person or monitor the wearer’s health.

“These would be high-tech offerings that change the game for the companies involved and for the industry,” said Charles Howland, president and chief engineer of Warwick Mills.

The advanced fabrics project, which is being announced on Friday, represents a new frontier for the Internet of Things. The term describes putting sensors and computing in all manner of physical objects — jet engines, power generators, cars, farm equipment and thermostats, among others — to measure and monitor everything from machines in need of repair to traffic patterns. Venture capitalists, start-ups and big corporations like General Electric and IBM are rushing to Internet of Things technology.

This latest initiative, Advanced Functional Fabrics of America, is intended to create a national network of research and development, design and manufacturing capabilities for the new fabrics. The products of this emerging field are being called “functional fabrics,” “connected fabrics,” “textile devices” and “smart garments.”

The field requires contributions from many disciplines, including materials science, electrical engineering, software development, human-computer interaction, advanced manufacturing and fashion design.

The Defense Department is investing to develop new combat uniforms that might communicate and change color, signaling friend or foe to help prevent deaths by friendly fire, or uniforms filled with optical sensors to make a soldier invisible to an enemy’s night-vision goggles. So far, the Pentagon, more than 30 universities, 49 companies and the state governments of Massachusetts and Georgia have agreed to participate, and more are expected to join.

Some of the pioneering research has been done at M.I.T., which is leading the project. Advanced research, in the precompetitive stage, will be published and shared.

Learn more: U.S. Textile Industry Turns to Tech as Gateway to Revival

See Also

Do distinct moral categories have an underlying neurologic basis?