At the report published by the World Health Organization, it has been claimed that the world’s most fatal and dangerous species in terms of human deaths are mosquitos. It has been informed that in 2015, 438 thousand people died due to malaria around the world. On the other hand, there has been an increase by 30% in the last 30 years in dang fever. In some countries, epidemics caused by mosquitos such as zika, dang, chikungunya and yellow fever are at the top list.
Sustainability is Important
Some groups tried to add new mosquito repellents to the fabric due to the increase resistance of the mosquitos against the repellents. There have been several attempts to design smart fabrics that can prevent mosquito bites. Micro-capsuling has been commonly used. However, these methods led to issues like sustainability and re-use. This limited the use of traditional micro beads and micro capsules for daily practical applications.
Provides Manual Use
The solution offered by the research requires a smart fabric system including a mechanism that can be reloaded and recharged several times with mosquito repellents and that can be controlled by the user while moving. The new concept using shape memory polymers enables the advantage of controlling the release of mosquito repellents when needed. SMPs are smart fabrics that have a specific shape, that change when exposed to heat, magnetic or electronic fields and that return to their actual forms.
