The cold and harsh climate in the High North represents a threat to work performance, comfort, health and safety. Progress in smart clothing materials and instrumentation offer a great potential for clothing that can significantly improve working conditions, and can offer the Norwegian textile industry a unique position to develop profitable products for applications in cold and wet environment.
ColdWear will address the fundamental mechanisms of how the interaction between environmental exposure, clothing, work load, and physiological regulatory system affect the working conditions. ColdWear will gain knowledge on how to integrate sensors in clothing that improve user safety without reducing comfort and work performance. ColdWear will develop fundamental understanding of how comfort and performance can be improved in this situation. At the core of ColdWear is to develop sensors and materials that provide a significant increase in performance. To reach this objective completely a multidisciplinary approach must be taken including co-operation between work physiology, material science and sensor technology.
The principal objective of ColdWear is to create the knowledge and scientific background for developing new clothing solutions that enable a significant increase in performance and safety of operations in the High North.
ColdWear has the following sub-goals:
To gain fundamental knowledge of how the interaction between environmental exposure, clothing, work load, and physiological regulatory system affect the worker.
To create knowledge on how to integrate sensors in clothing.
To develop fundamental understanding of how comfort and work performance can be improved.
To document the obtained knowledge by publishing at least 10 papers in international refereed journals and 10 conference papers.
To educate two PhD's and supervise ten master students who will constitute to an attractive recruitment base for the Norwegian textile industry and industrial players in the High North.
To provide the project partners a significant competitive advantage that will be realized by initiation of several industrial innovative spin-off projects that utilize ideas created in ColdWear.
