New Range of Smart Fabrics That Turn Clothes Into Computers, Displays

Touchscreens on your sleeves? What else could be more exciting than not only using a computer or smartphone but also wearing it to make your look chic and high-tech! Smart fabric developed in China could have capabilities such as communication, safety, healthcare, and navigation applications that would transform the clothes we wear into computers or displays, the study "Large-area display textiles integrated with functional systems" revealed.

Flexible, Lightweight, Breathable Smart Fabric

Researchers said comparing this with traditional rigid thin-film electronic devices, smart fabrics are extremely flexible, lightweight, and breathable.

As this novel fabric is solar-powered and merges luminescent and conductive fibers with cotton. It could be made and integrated into shirts, jackets, or dresses. Designers can actually put a touchscreen on the sleeves of your shirt or jackets to access a digital map, for example, among other apps.

Researchers said electronic fabrics could show various functions of energy harvesting, energy storage, light emission, sensing, displaying, and communicating. Batteries and displays, they added, may be available this year while other items are still under development and could be available in the next years.

Smart Clothing in Existence for Years

This smart fabric is not the only attempt to combine clothing and electronics. For years, the smart clothing industry has been in existence and produced such gear as a jacket developed by Levi's and Google that lets you manage a mobile device using a wireless controller in the sleeve. A new running shoe from Under Armour also allows you to get real-time performance feedback.

New generation smart fabrics would have garments do several tasks, like monitor your health.

An obvious problem with placing circuits and screens on clothing is that it is uncomfortable. However, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (MIT CSAIL) disclosed in an announcement that they had developed smart clothes that monitor subtle movements. But the best thing about this is that they feel like just your everyday clothes when you wear them.

Researchers revealed in a video that their clothes could determine that the person is doing some poses, sitting, or walking. These clothes could be used for sports training, medical rehabilitation, or even track the health of people in care facilities.

Old Clothes Turned into Interactive Materials

You can even have your old clothes turn into smart fabric. Researchers from Microsoft Corporation said they had developed a technique that would transform traditional materials, such as clothes kept in your cabinet for years, into interactive, smart fabric.

In the Microsoft study, "Capacitivo: Contact-Based Object Recognition on Interactive Fabrics using Capacitive Sensing," the scientists utilized a recognition method named Capacitivo that can be integrated with fabric to recognize items placed on it. Capacitivo, for example, could recommend a meal in a diner or offer a drink suggestion as it identifies the food on the table.

Smart Fabric that Adjusts to Weather

Smart fabrics could also cool you down in hot weather or while you exercise. University of Manchester researchers utilized thermal properties and graphene that is flexible and is one-molecule thick, as noted in a school news release. They showed how the ability of graphene layers could be electrically tuned and integrated into fabrics to radiate energy.

Researchers note that controlling thermal radiation is an important necessity for various critical applications, like body temperature management in extreme environments. Thermal blankets, they say, are a common example that is used for this purpose. Yet maintaining functionalities as the weather heats up or cools down has been a difficult challenge for the researchers.

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