In this paper, the washability of wearable textronic (textile-electronic) devices has been studied. Two different approaches aiming at designing, producing, and testing robust washable and reliable smart textile systems are presented. The common point of the two approaches is the use of flexible conductive PCB in order to interface the miniaturized rigid (traditional) electronic devices to conductive threads and tracks within the textile flexible fabric and to connect them to antenna, textile electrodes, sensors, actuators, etc. The first approach consists in the use of TPU films (thermoplastic polyurethane) that are deposited by the press under controlled temperature and pressure parameters in order to protect the conductive thread and electrical contacts. The washability of conductive threads and contact resistances between flexible PCB and conductive threads are tested. The second approach is focused on the protection of the whole system—composed of a rigid electronic device, flexible PCB, and textile substrate—by a barrier made of latex. Three types of prototypes were realized and washed. Their reliabilities are studied.

The fuzzy front-end plays a most crucial part in new product development (NPD), leading to the success of product development and product launch in the market. This study proposes a novel method, TTRI_MP, by combining Crawford and Di Benedetto’s model and Cooper’s model, to strengthen the management of the fuzzy front-end. The proposed method comprises four stages: market exploration and technology forecasting, idea generation and segmentation, portfolio analysis and technology roadmapping (TRM). In the first stage, SWOT was utilized to identify the key strategic areas, and the technology readiness level (TRL) was adopted to position the level of developed technologies. In the second stage, the business concepts were required to go through the viability test and customers, collaborators, competitors and company (4C). In the third stage, the Strategic Position Analysis (SPAN) and Financial Analysis (FAN) developed by IBM were employed in the portfolio analysis to screen out potential NPD projects. In the last stage, the selected NPD projects were linked with their functions and technologies in the TRM chart. The method was successfully implemented by a research team working on a flexible fabric supercapacitor at the Taiwan Textile Research Institute (TTRI).