Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:
Wearable devices are popular these days, but they’re largely restricted to watches, rings, and eyewear. Researchers have now developed a thread-based computer that can be stitched into clothes. Being able to sense what our bodies are up is useful in areas like healthcare and sports. And while devices like smartwatches can track metrics like heart rate, body temperature, and movement, humans produce huge amounts of data that devices tethered to specific points of the body largely miss. That’s what prompted MIT engineers to create a fabric computer that can be stitched into regular clothes. The device features sensors, processors, memory, batteries, and both optical and Bluetooth communications, allowing networks of these fibers to provide sophisticated whole-body monitoring.
“Our bodies broadcast gigabytes of data through the skin every second in the form of heat, sound, biochemicals, electrical potentials, and light, all of which carry information about our activities, emotions, and health,” MIT professor Yoel Fink, who led the research, said in a press release. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach clothes to capture, analyze, store, and communicate this important information in the form of valuable health and activity insights?” The MIT team has been working on incorporating electronics into fibers for more than a decade, but in a recent paper in Nature they outline a breakthrough that significantly boosts the sophistication of the devices they can build.
More here.
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