Footfalls & Heartbeats, the Nottingham, UK-based developer of smart fabrics, has secured funding from the European Commission through the European Smart Textile Accelerator programme (SmartX).

In a collaborative project, it will now focus on developing KiTT, its motion tracking knee sleeve which sits over the joint directly and provides advanced data and insight into its condition.

KiTT’s main target markets are health and wellbeing and sports and fitness, where it will assist patients with injury rehabilitation and physiotherapy, as well as helping monitor athletes during activities.

As part of the product development, Footfalls & Heartbeats will be collaborating on app development and maintenance with Revolve, a software developer agency based in Poland, and on security, hardware and electronics development with Ioetec, a UK-based internet of things security firm.

The SmartX accelerator programme focuses on plugging the gap between smart textile prototypes and market readiness and is funding and supporting 40 pioneering SME projects across Europe.

“Footfalls is producing state-of-the-art textile technology to assist remote physiological monitoring in many sectors,” said founder and CSO Simon McMaster. “We are grateful to receive the support and funding from SmartX and looking forward to getting started on our project.

www.footfallsandheartbeats.com