Super-Smart Textiles: A Self-Powered Wearable Technology for Remote Health Monitoring (Ref: UF-ID-2024)

According to the World Health Organisation, over 1 billion of the global population suffer from disabilities. However, access to rehabilitation care has been a global issue due to lack of resources including infrastructure and trained professionals. This has created an unprecedented demand for new technologies that can enable remote monitoring, consultation, and training of rehabilitation patients, vastly increasing the global access to rehabilitation care.

Remote monitoring of patients’ movements is challenging due to drawbacks in existing technologies. For example, conventional sensor techniques such as optoelectronic methods and inertial measurement units can be expensive, bulky, restricted in range, and often require specialist equipment and expertise. However, recent advances in Internet of Things and smart textiles have created a range of new, efficient, affordable, and real-time wearable technologies for remote health monitoring and motion sensing. Some of these technologies, including triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG) and piezoelectric nanogenerators (PENG), have shown the potential to act as self-powered systems that capture the energy required for their operation during natural body movements. Our recent work has created a number of new pathways in constructing wearable and self-powered movement monitoring systems based on textiles and flexible materials 

Your Project

The project builds on our previous work, exploring a revolutionary new approach to designing and fabricating a wearable systems for remote musculoskeletal rehabilitation monitoring. This project can be developed in one of the number of areas depending on the experience and the preference of the candidate, including the development of smart textile materials, functional polymers, sensor design and development, biomechanical testing, signal acquisition and analysis. The wearable sensing system(s) developed in this project will then be evaluated against gold-standard optoelectronic and inertial motion capture techniques during common rehabilitation exercises. The system may finally be applied to monitor and quantify existing rehabilitation activities in real-world environments.

The School of Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering has seen 100% of its research impact rated as ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’ (REF, 2021).

Supervisors

Primary supervisor: Ishara Dharmasena

Entry requirements

Applicants should have, or expect to achieve, at least a 2:1 bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in engineering, material science, chemistry, sport and exercise science, biomechanics, computer science, or a related subject.

English language requirements

Applicants must meet the minimum English language requirements. Further details are available on the International website.

How to apply

All applications should be made online. Under the programme name, select ‘Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering/Electronic, Electrical & Systems Engineering’ and quote the advert reference number UF-ID-2024 in your application.

To avoid delays in processing your application, please ensure that you submit your CV and the minimum supporting documents. .

The following selection criteria will be used by academic schools to help them make a decision on your application.

Apply now