The hand of textiles – definitions, achievements, perspectives – a review

The aims of this wide-range review concerning the hand of textiles are to present: (1) the diversity of definitions and the complexity of analysis of the hand of textiles; (2) the authors’ own definition of the hand of textiles and division of techniques of its analysis. The review presents objective techniques, subjective techniques along with their physiological background, and a combination of techniques as well as a new biomechanical approach called modelling of skin. The structure of the paper is as follows: • definitions of the hand of textiles, including the authors’ definition; • objective techniques of hand measurement; • physiological approach; • subjective techniques of hand measurement; • combination of objective and subjective techniques; • modelling techniques and the biomechanics approach for measurement of the hand of textiles; • division of hand measurement techniques according to the authors. This paper gives a review of the international literature from 1930 to 2010 concerning the hand of textiles and other related subjects like skin physiology, perception though the skin, and biomechanical aspects of the skin. Due to obvious limitations the authors have chosen only those papers which seemed to have the strongest relation to the presented topic and which are at the same time the most interesting studies in the authors’ opinion.