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Volume 8 J Community Med Health Educ, an open access journal
ISSN: 2161-0711 Public Health 2018
February 26-28, 2018
Page 43
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PUBLIC HEALTH AND NUTRITION
3rd World Congress on
February 26-28, 2018 London, UK
Yi Li, J Community Med Health Educ 2018, Vol 8
DOI: 10.4172/2161-0711-C1-31
SMART TEXTILE WEARABLES AND DIGITAL HEALTHCARE
With a global trend of ageing population, health systems in many countries are under substantial budget pressure to meet the future
needs. Reduction of hospital bed days by achieving earlier discharge after surgery becomes inevitable to cut down the NHS
expenditure. However, without appropriate healthcare, patients are at the risk from isolation, depression, strokes and fractures caused
by falls in the home, as well as the post-operative complications, which will result in increasing hospital readmission rates. It has been
identified that 80% of face-to-face interactions with the NHS are unnecessary if appropriate technologies could be developed to mitigate
these problems. To address the healthcare grand challenge of “Transforming community health & care”, there is an urgent to develop
advanced smart functional e-textile wearables for creating innovative ultimate personalized e-healthcare technologies. This could be
achieved by developing advanced techniques to engineer advanced materials (e.g. graphene) into and/or onto textile fibers, which will
be interfaced with human body and internet mobile devices and cloud computational modelling and simulation of physiological and
biomechanical behaviors of human body, as well as its interactions with clothing and external environment. Thus, smooth real time
healthcare monitoring, advices and risk/emergency warnings to patients and their medical doctors could be provided in a invasive and
invisible fashion. To achieve the goals, there are a number of key scientific and technical challenges to be addressed, including:
1. Establish scientific understanding and engineering principle to fabricate advanced nano-scale functional materials such as
graphene into flexible and strong smart fibers with sensing, energy harvesting, energy storage and/or actualization functions;
2. Develop advanced manufacturing techniques to produce advanced wearable smart textile materials (fabrics) using the smart
fibres;
3. Develop science of design and engineering principles of system integration of smart fabrics with micro-electronics to produce
smart devices;
4. Derive technical solutions to integrate smart devices with wireless data communication technologies to transfer data to cloud
servers;
5. Develop cloud-based database, data analysis techniques, as well as computational modeling and simulation of human biological
behavior, material functional performance and their interactions with external environments to establish digital biological
health avatar for individuals;
6. Develop technical solutions to provide real-time medical professional guidance and feedback to individuals and/or healthcare
workers. Careful consideration of the ethics, risks and regulation of such technology is vital from its inception, as the success of
this work will challenge both individual patients' healthcare and wellbeing and the organization of timely medical intervention
to save lives and reduce healthcare expenses. In this lecture, the scientific foundations are reviewed and the principles are
illustrated by examples.
Biography
Yi Li is a full professor and chair in Textile Science and Engineering in the School of Materials, the University of Manchester. He is a Life Fellow of Royal Society of Art,
Commerce and Manufacturing and International BiographicalAssociation and Fellow of the Textile Institute, and adjunct professors of a number of universities in China and
a member of several professional bodies. He is the Chairman of Textile Bioengineering and Informatics Society and the Editor-in-Chief of “Journal of Fiber Bioengineering
and Informatics”.
Yi Li
The University of Manchester, UK