Digital Fabric has Memory, Temperature Sensors and a Neural Network
14 June 2021: MIT researchers have created the first fiber with digital capabilities, able to sense, store, analyze, and infer activity after being sewn into a shirt. Yoel Fink, who is a professor in the departments of materials science and engineering and electrical engineering and computer science, a Research Laboratory of Electronics principal investigator and the senior author on the study, says digital fibers expand the possibilities for fabrics to uncover the context of hidden patterns in the human body that could be used for physical performance monitoring, medical inference, and early disease detection.
Until now, electronic fibers have been analog – carrying a continuous electrical signal – rather than digital, where discrete bits of information can be encoded and processed in 0s and 1s. For further information see the IDTechEx report on E-textiles and Smart Clothing 2020-2030: Technologies, Markets and Players.
“This work presents the first realization of a fabric with the ability to store and process data digitally, adding a new information content dimension to textiles and allowing fabrics to be programmed literally,” Fink says.
The new fiber was created by placing hundreds of square silicon microscale digital chips into a preform that was then used to create a polymer fiber. By precisely controlling the polymer flow, the researchers were able to create a fiber with continuous electrical connection between the chips over a length of tens of meters.
The fiber itself is thin and flexible and can be passed through a needle, sewn into fabrics, and washed at least 10 times without breaking down. According to Gabriel Loke, a lead author on the paper, “When you put it into a shirt, you can’t feel it at all. You wouldn’t know it was there.” Making a digital fiber “opens up different areas of opportunities and actually solves some of the problems of functional fibers,” he says.
When they were dreaming up “crazy ideas” for the fiber, Loke says, they thought about applications like a wedding gown that would store digital wedding music within the weave of its fabric, or even writing the story of the fiber’s creation into its components. Fink notes that the research at MIT was in close collaboration with the textile department at RISD led by Missakian. Gitelson-Kahn incorporated the digital fibers into a knitted garment sleeve, thus paving the way to creating the first digital garment.
This research was supported by the U.S. Army Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies, National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Office, the MIT Sea Grant and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
Source: www.printedelectronicsworld.com
