Knowing ‘My Location Now is essential’, it emerged at the successful completion of our SmartT project on e-Textiles. Indeed, the importance of being aware of one’s current location might just save a life.
Discerning your exact location is an integral skill for military personnel to hone, especially during Escape and Extraction training exercises. So we were fortunate to have leaders from the SERE (Survive Evade Resist & Extract) training camp at RAF St Mawgan, as well as Military export advisors from Larkhill Barracks and a representative of the International Guild of Battlefield Guides come in and join us for our final workshop of this €5m collaboration.
Fabric maps, aka SplashMaps, are specialised to offer a variety of benefits when it comes to military and civilian use. Kicking off the workshop, Warrant Officer John Lewis & Captain Mark Burgh demonstrated a number of these advantages to the assembled shareholders, partners, and guests from business, academia, and the NHS. All these people then helped to plan out the next steps for further developing e-textiles for use in different industries.
SplashMaps now have Patents for e-Textiles filed in both the UK and US as part of a joint effort to make the UK a leader in innovation with this technology. Working with Southampton University, prototypes of maps using e-Textiles were created to guide our plans for the future. It’s anticipated that these products will be used across various industries from entertainment, fashion, sport, marine and defence, which Frost and Sullivan estimates as a £10bn market.
Maps that save lives is a concept we are developing to specifically aid military personnel in dangerous, urban conflict zones. Specifically engineered with the help of SERE instructors and advisors, the next e-SplashMap targets those who may need extraction from the field of urban conflict. A rapid understanding of ‘my location now’ means they are better able to avoid capture and find their designated extraction point quickly.
This collaborative project involving experts from all disciplines ranging from organic chemistry and polymer science to electronics, textiles and marine biology was only made possible due to the funding by Interreg, EU’s interregional fund. We are deeply thankful for this support as it allowed us to bring together such an eclectic range of skills and drive groundbreaking innovation.
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