Smart Care Textile for Caregiver Support

Project Description

Smart Care Textile is a solution to support caregivers. The sensor textile provides them with all care-related information and, if necessary, triggers alarms.

Overview of Smart Care Textile

Care for the elderly is a central issue in the European social policy. There is a shortage of skilled workers, such as caregivers, which is forecasted to increase further due to demographic changes. Nursing teams have a growing need of digital and technical support to cope with the rising number of people in need of care and documentation requirements. Smart Care Textile is a new solution for care support. The innovative sensor textile, which is not noticeably positioned under the bedsheet, provides the caregiver with all care-related information and, if necessary, triggers alarms over the nurse call system.

Smart Care Textile structure overview

The advantages are:

Relief and more security for the caregiver through optimized processes and more information
Cost saving for nursing home management and social insurance agencies
More safety and a higher standard of care for those in need of care
Certainty and safety for relatives and private caregivers
Fewer false alarms thanks to a fully monitored bed.

The project is developed from the following base product:

Project development & SmartX support

A big difficulty in the smart textiles value chain is the lack of understanding and collaboration among the various disciplines: IT, electronics, textiles, and plastics. New product solutions cannot be developed alone, but only in an interdisciplinary team with different expertise. This is where SmartX comes in.

"The support allows us to drive this interdisciplinary collaboration and enables the further development of our current product Wisbi. Through SmartX, we have the opportunity to participate in coaching sessions to cover open questions and topics that go beyond our in-house competencies. This helps enormously in developing the best possible product, which would not be possible to this extent without SmartX."~TEXIBLE

Wisbi Electronic

Smart Care Textile sensor in production

Care Cockpit: clear presentation of patient data for caregivers

Meet the team

Smart Care Textile is developed by four SMEs: TEXIBLE GmbH (project lead), Sturiatronic Projektmanagement GmbH and Arkulpa GmbH from Austria, and FMB care GmbH from Germany. TEXIBLE is a spin off of the University of Innsbruck and specialized in smart textile solutions. They support companies and research institutes from the idea until mass production.