CA17107 - European Network to connect research and innovation efforts on advanced Smart Textiles (CONTEXT)

CONTEXT COST Action objective is to create a network of European researchers and main relevant stakeholders in order to develop joint ideas and initiatives which can be turned into advanced smart textile products.

A smart textile material is a “functional textile material, which interacts actively with its environment, i.e. it responds or adapts to changes in the environment”. They find applications in all sectors and especially in health and medical; automotive and aeronautic; personal protective equipment; sports and wearables and buildings and interior design.

Although several R&D projects have been carried out during last years in that field, most of the prototypes obtained haven’t reached the market due to many reasons such as: product reliability, production economies, missing a demonstrated use case and/or value proposition.

In that sense, what CONTEXT aims is to ignite research and innovation projects (with high TRLs output expected) by joining under the same network and through Working Groups, people with the right competencies and experiences from the academic and research fields, the industrial sector and from clusters.

CONTEXT will promote the development of a joint research roadmap for smart textiles, will foster the transfer of knowledge among different actors in order to find suitable applications in various multidisciplinary fields, will act as stakeholder platform to identify needs and requirements from different points of view in a bottom-up approach and will promote networking activities in order to attract talent, build more and better research projects with more consciousness on the objectives of creating exploitable results.