Abstract
Medical textile is an extremely important subcategory of technical textile because it is covering a wide range of products. The term medical textile itself covers all types of textile materials that are used in the healthcare system for various purposes. Medical textile is also known as health textile and is one of the fastest growing sectors in the technical textile market. The growth rate of technical textiles in this area is due to constant improvements and innovations in both areas: textile technologies and medical procedures. Textile structures used in this field include yarns, woven, knitted and non-woven textile materials as well as composite materials reinforced with textiles. The number of applications is large and diverse, from simple surgical sutures to complex composite structures for bone and tissue replacement, hygiene materials, protective products used in operating rooms and in the process of postoperative wound treatment. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of technical textiles for medical, surgical and healtcare applications, to indicate which textiles are currently used in this field.
Highlights
The term technical textiles includes all textile-based products used primarily for their performance or functional characteristics, not for their aesthetic and decorative properties
Technical textile products are usually classified into twelve groups, based on application and end-user industry, and is mainly comprised of (Figure 1): agro textiles, construction textiles, clothing textiles, geo-textiles, domestic textiles, industrial textiles, medical textiles, textiles used in transport, packaging textiles, protective textiles, sports textiles and environmentally-friendly textiles [3,4]
Depending on the application of medical textiles, an appropriate choice of constituent elements can be made, starting from the type of polymers and fibres to the shape of the textile structure and the type of textile material.Textile fibres used for medical purposes differ from other conventional materials because they must meet certain standards and criteria, as follows [10]:
Summary
The term technical textiles includes all textile-based products used primarily for their performance or functional characteristics, not for their aesthetic and decorative properties. This means that technical textile is designed to feature wide spectrum of certain characteristics, making them suitable for application in extensive range of industries (automotive, aerospace, construction, protective gear, healthcare, and others). Depending on their purpose, these textiles are designed to have improved filtration, flexibility, durability, lightness, resistance and strength properties, amongst other features [1, 2]. The healthcare and medical sectors offer the greatest opportunities for the development of the most sophisticated and valuable textile materials for different types of medical applications and represent one of the most important areas for stimulating production of technical textiles [7, 8]
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