With textile electronics, the Hochschule Niederrhein is offering a new specialisation for the Master's degree programmes in electrical engineering and textile products from the upcoming winter semester 22/23.
Innovative materials, future-oriented processing technologies, complex analytical procedures as well as aspects of sustainability, product design and project management are just a few selected contents that will be offered in an interdisciplinary, collaborative and project-oriented way.
Qualification in systems and applications, as well as materials and processes from the disciplines of Electrical Engineering, Textile Engineering and Clothing Technology are taught with concrete application examples, for example, from the fields of fashion, sports and lifestyle, medicine, automotive, architecture.

The specialization is aimed at Bachelor graduates in Electrical Engineering, Textile Engineering and Clothing Technology as well as related disciplines.
The program can also be taken part-time according to the respective Master's degree programme.

An international bachelor's degree in this field will also be offered soon.

In the Knetex research project (EFRE-0801285), various faculties of the Hochschule Niederrhein collaborated with the company Bache Innovative and the Institute for Experimental Psychophysiology (IXP) to develop a textile-integrated sensor system for feedback-supported rehabilitation after anterior cruciate ligament surgery. This resulted in the KneTex Bandage - an active smart textile consisting of sensors and actuators that can perceive and recognize the user's movement stimuli and actively react to them on the basis of the actuator technology. In this way, the KneTex brace enables the body to stabilize itself without limiting movement, shortening the rehabilitation period and reducing instability of the knee.

The Knetex project was sponsored by the European Regional Development Fund North Rhine-Westphalia (EFRE.NRW) and was supervised in the Faculty of Textile and Clothing Technology by Prof. Dr. Anne Schwarz-Pfeiffer and Prof. Dr. Kerstin Zöll.

The aim of the SmartSeam project (IGF project 09689/19) is to use seams for functional integration in garments. By combining conductive materials and other functional threads, sensors and actuators can be incorporated into a textile through crossing and interlacing points in the seam without an additional processing step. To achieve this, a lockstitch machine with two separate thread laying units is used. A modular protective vest with integrated optical filaments has already been realized to increase the visibility of the wearer. Furthermore, demonstrators with integrated motion and body physiological sensors are being developed. The project is carried out in cooperation with the University College Ghent (Belgium) and is sponsored by the AiF within the framework of the program for the promotion of joint industrial research IGF of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection.

This project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Anne Schwarz-Pfeiffer, Prof. Dr. Kerstin Zöll and Prof. Dr. Thomas Weide.