The new system targets one of technical textiles’ most persistent blind spots: translating fabric feel into measurable, comparable data that can support quality control, product performance and supply-chain consistency.
Roaches International will use Techtextil 2026 to demonstrate Sentire, a fabric-handle testing system designed to convert tactile properties such as softness, smoothness, stiffness and creasability into objective data.
The commercial problem it addresses is real. In many technical textiles, handle is not just an aesthetic preference but closely linked to functional performance. Yet handle assessment has traditionally depended on expert human judgement, which is difficult to standardize across mills, finishers, brands and testing locations. Roaches says Sentire was developed specifically to create a common language for fabric tactility and to support more consistent decision-making across the supply chain.
That matters because subjective evaluation does not scale well in a market facing tighter quality expectations, growing digitization and the gradual loss of experienced textile specialists. The University of Leeds, which collaborated with Roaches on the underlying evaluation approach, has described the challenge as the absence of a standard language for fabric tactile properties, making it harder to ensure consistent quality and increasing waste when products fail to meet expectations.
Roaches says Sentire uses multiple controlled tests to generate a “fingerprint” of a fabric’s tactile behavior, allowing samples to be compared between batches and communicated digitally across locations. The company argues this can support real-time quality monitoring, reduce rework and help manufacturers understand how finishing, coating or laundering changes performance. It also positions the system as suitable for woven, knitted and nonwoven fabrics.
The broader significance is that technical textiles are moving toward data-defined quality in more areas of production. If Sentire gains industry traction, Roaches could do for tactile evaluation what the spectrophotometer did for color: make a subjective judgement far more measurable, repeatable and transferable.
