Singapore Researchers Weave Washable Electronic Fabric Into Interactive Interface
NUS researchers have made a washable fabric that turns clothing into an interactive interface, a Nature study says.
The work, led by NUS research engineer Fu Heng, showed a person interacting with computing devices using the sleeve of a wool sweater. The paper describes the approach as a shift from flexible panels toward truly textile-native architectures, adding that it could lay the groundwork for fabrics that visualize, sense, communicate and compute as naturally as the garments they inhabit. The researchers said the development marked a significant advance. The Register reported on the development.
To make the fibers, the team used lasers to strip insulation from specific points on thin copper wires and attached light-emitting chips to the exposed sections, creating electrical connections. They connected thousands of chips to the wires with high precision, then fed the fibers into a transparent plastic tube. Two strips of a compressible, conductive polymer were added into a second longitudinal channel in the tube to make the fibers pressure-sensitive.
The paper says the method could produce millimeter-thick fibers 10 meters long that are thin and flexible enough to be woven into or attached to fabrics. The researchers also added peripherals including a microphone, a speaker, a temperature sensor and a light sensor. According to the paper, the technology could eventually lead to a future in which clothing functions as a pervasive, multimodal human-computer interface.