Subhajit Nan, Amity University, Kolkata.
Researchers in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States have recently made the world’s first fibre computer- a fibre with digital capabilities, which can sense, store, analyse and infer activity after being sewn into a shirt, thereby paving the path for the creation of the first-ever digital garment.
Digital fibres or the so-called fibre computer can expand the possibilities for fabrics to understand the context of hidden patterns in the human body, which can be used for physical performance monitoring, medical inference, and early disease detection. Arguably, we can say that someday in the future we might be able to store our wedding music in the gown we are going to wear!
Until now, electronic fibres have been analogue, i.e., they carry a continuous electrical signal. But in this new digital fibre, discrete bits of information can be encoded and processed in 0s and 1s.
This research realizes the first fabric possessing the ability to store raw data and process that into information digitally, and hence, adding a new information content dimension to textiles by allowing fabrics to be programmed literally.
Digital Memory Storage:
The new digital fibre was created by placing several hundreds of micro scales square silicon digital chips into a preform which was initially used to create a polymer fibre. By accurately controlling the polymer flow, the researchers were able to create a fibre with a continuous electrical connection between the chips over a length of tens of meters.
Structurally, the fibre is very thin and flexible. It can be passed through a needle and easily sewn into fabrics. Additionally, it can be washed at least 10 times without wear and tear. It is so light that it feels as if it is not even there.
This is to our advantage that making a digital fibre opens different areas of opportunities and solves some of the problems of functional fibres. For example, there is a way to control and manipulate individual elements within a fibre, from one point straight at the end of the fibre. The research team has devised a digital addressing method that allows them to operate the functionality of one element without turning on all the elements.
Additionally, a digital fibre can also store a lot of information in memory. The researchers were successfully able to read, write and store information in it, like a 767KB short movie file and a 0.48 MB music file. It was found that the files can be stored for two months without a power supply.
This essentially means the fibres would store digital wedding music within the weave of its fabric and can even script the story of its creation into its components! They also incorporated the digital fibres into a knitted garment sleeve, thus paving the way to creating the first digital garment.
Artificial Intelligence on body surface:
The digital fibre incorporates artificial intelligence by including, within its memory, a neural network of 1,650 connections. After sewing it around the armpit of a shirt, they used it to collect the data of 4 hours and 30 minutes of surface body temperature from a person wearing the shirt and analyse how this data corresponded to his different physical activities. Based on this data, the fibre was able to determine what activity the person wearing it was engaged with 96 per cent accuracy.
This AI component further increases the possibilities of the fibre. Fabrics with digital components can collect a lot of information across the body over time, and these data are perfect for machine learning algorithms. The digital fibres could give quantity and quality open-source data for extracting out new body patterns that are unknown to us yet. With this analytic power, the fibres can someday sense and alert people in real-time to health changes like a respiratory decline or an irregular heartbeat or deliver muscle activation or heart rate data to athletes during training.
The fibre is controlled by a small external device as of now. Naturally, the next step of the research will be to design a new chip as a micro-controller, that can be connected within the fibre itself. When that is accomplished, we can truly call it a “fibre computer”.
Also read: Understanding Prions In Neurodegenerative Diseases
References:
- Loke, G., Khudiyev, T., Wang, B. et al. Digital electronics in fibres enable fabric-based machine-learning inference. Nat Commun 12, 3317 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23628-5
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