It is not uncommon to have a favorite bra, or a lucky pair of pants. Now, innovations in E-Textiles and Smart Clothing have taken this phenomenon to the next level. Imagine a pair of pants that can play your party playlist when you get too sad, or a bra that can turn down the thermostat when your indoor workout raises your temperature.

Antimicrobial technologies such as coatings and textiles containing silver and copper are helping people during the COVID-19 pandemic by ensuring that whatever they touch, whether that is a door handle or their own mask, is free from live SARS-CoV-2 particles. But how exactly do these antimicrobial technologies work?

While technologies are emerging for cities to be independent in food, water and energy, safe and pleasant, progress is mostly poor and global warming threatens migrants overwhelming cities. By all means, let us see the smart city advances take place that are in the IDTechEx report, "Smart Cities Market 2021-2041: Energy, Food, Water, Materials, Transportation Forecasts", but it would be prudent to try to reverse the move to cities that the UN and others see resulting in 70-80% of us in them by 2050.

We are looking for entrepreneurial, enthusiastic people to join IDTechEx to apply their technical knowledge. You will be involved with technology scouting, market research and consultancy in a rapidly growing, exciting, global firm.

Today, antimicrobial technologies are used around the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Surfaces and products protected by antimicrobial technology can continuously inactivate and kill harmful microorganisms such as the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In this article, IDTechEx highlights three innovative start-ups that are developing next-generation antimicrobial technologies.

Wednesday 10 March 2021 - What are the key antimicrobial technologies on the market today?; How do they work? Mechanisms of action for key antimicrobial technologies; Innovations in antimicrobial technologies - what are companies developing?; and more.

Companies are successfully innovating as an old technology pivots quickly to tackling a global problem.

COVID-19 is driving 3- and 4-digit growth for antimicrobial companies - this market has received significant attention from governments, industry, and even consumers over the past year (2020) due to the technology's potential to address transmission of COVID-19.

3D printing offers an efficient method to improve current manufacturing limits across economic sectors such as transport, construction, and medical and dental industries allowing rapid prototyping and on-site production and repairs.

Brand new report available from IDTechEx - "Antimicrobial Technology Market 2021-2031" - antimicrobial additives and antimicrobial coatings provide continuous and residual antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal action

IDTechEx currently have a number of healthcare, food and agtech webinars available to watch on-demand. These include presentations on robotic surgery, vertical farming, plant-based and cultured meat, advances in agtech and skin analysis technologies.

The biggest trends in CVD management currently revolve around remote patient monitoring (RPM), which enables the patients' health to be examined from a distance.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted the 3D printing sector and its end users (such as printing bureaus), new directions of travel have nonetheless emerged. Some opportunities have even been directly prompted by the pandemic.

Printed/flexible electronics is extremely well suited to wearable skin patches due to its low weight, flexibility/conformality, and potential for high-throughput, low-cost manufacturing of these disposable items.

Thursday 17 December 2020 - An IDTechEx Perspective for 2020. The webinar will cover Vertical farming; Plant-based and cultured meat; Biostimulants and biopesticides; Genetic technologies in agriculture; and Agricultural robots and drones.

While the basic smart city ideas are mainly updates, the materials and devices enabling them are certainly new and they do add remarkable new functions.

At IDTechEx, we cover emerging technologies and industry trends, and the COVID-19 pandemic has had a direct or indirect impact on all of them. In this article we will describe some of the key roles that these technologies have played in 2020.

The sudden spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 has considerably exacerbated the existing issue of growing patient backlogs. Image recognition artificial intelligence (AI) represents a potential solution to this problem.

Singapore has become the first country on Earth to approve cultured meat for commercial sale. On December 2nd, the Singapore Food Agency said that the cultured chicken produced by San Francisco-based start-up Eat Just met the safety standards for use in nuggets, opening the door for a commercial launch in the country.

Fluoropolymers are typically available as liquids and solids, but new fluoroelastomers are getting interest.