Professor Steve Beeby from the University of Southampton has been awarded a prestigious Chair in Emerging Technologies to pioneer reliable e-textile systems that are invisible to the wearer.

The Electronics and Computer Science professor is one of just eight UK-based researchers to share £22 million of funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering.

The research will exploit printed active materials, flexible circuit technologies and textile engineering to integrate sensing, electronic and energy harvesting/storage functionality within a single textile.

Professor Beeby, Head of the Smart Electronic Materials and Systems (SEMS) group, says: “We all come into contact with textiles every day of our lives - in our clothes, inside our homes and in our cars - which makes fabrics an ideal platform technology that can, for example, monitor our health and support healthy ageing, make us safer and more visible at night and improve our technique when taking part in sports activities.

"However, the properties of a textile and their method of manufacture mean they are very challenging when we try to incorporate electronic and sensing functionality. Also, there is currently no alternative to using conventional batteries to power e-textiles and these are incompatible with the nature of a fabric. We are working to overcome these many challenges to deliver robust and effective e-textiles systems that we will all use on a daily basis in the not-too-distant future."

Professor Beeby follows in the footsteps of Southampton colleagues Professor Susan Gourvenec and Professor Themis Prodromakis, who were both awarded Chairs in Emerging Technologies in 2019.

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A human performance expert from the University of Southampton is urging the public to balance social media with other more challenging, but ultimately more satisfying forms of communication during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Writing in The Conversation, Electronics and Computer Science's Professor m.c. schraefel warned that an overreliance on social media can have a detrimental effect on overall health and mental stability.

"As we continue to adapt to the various restrictions, we should remember that social media is the refined sugar of social interaction," she says. "In the same way that producing a bowl of white granules means removing minerals and vitamins from the sugarcane plant, social media strips out many valuable and sometimes necessarily challenging parts of 'whole' human communication."

Government rules are shaping acceptable forms of physical social engagement as confirmed cases of the virus rise across UK and the use of social media and other online tools is expected to rise to bridge the gap.

"We are wired to deal with every aspect of physically present personal contact - from the uncomfortable conversations to the hugely gratifying exchanges," Professor schraefel says. "We suffer without it."

Professor schraefel underlines the importance of designing virtual methods of communication that embrace more of the physiology of social contact that people need and help them thrive.

Her latest work as part of the UKRI COVID-19 research response with the AutoTrust project is seeing how more signals can be incorporated to enable better engagement and creativity in virtual teams. Participants are invited to sign up for the Make Virtual Teams Better Study.

Read Professor schraefel’s full article in The Conversation.