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Executive Summary

The notion of smart materials was defined in Japan in 1989. The first textile material that, in retroaction, was labelled as a smart textile was silk thread having a shape memory. The discovery of shape memory materials in the 1960s and intelligent polymeric gels in the 1970s was, however, generally accepted as the birth of real smart materials. It was not before the late 1990s that intelligent materials were introduced in textiles. First research related to communicative textiles was conducted in different laboratories in the late 1990s, and the first textile electronic semiconductive components were realized in the mid-1990s.