Clothing is an everyday thing to many people and has seen many technological innovations: elastic fabrics that stretch, thick fabrics that repel rain and cold, open fabrics that “breathe,” and now with the aid of weave that conduct electricity will come fabrics that can communicate. Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES) have published information on new fiber that can be used in traditional knitting and weaving techniques to monitor human movement and store the energy needed to power that function.

Science Daily reports that the team demonstrated these fibers in action, which can relay information on stretch and compression. This means that a garment stitched with these fibers can communicate movement to another device. The demonstration involved a knee sleeve prototype that could “talk” to a commercial receiver.

“These advances are made possible by the combination of skills that ARC Centres of Excellence bring together to tackle challenging areas,” said ACES Director Gordon Wallace. “We are able to take fundamental advances in materials science and engineering and to realise wearable structures for use in sports training and rehabilitation applications.”

Clothing and the “wearable” revolution

So far, wearables have largely been realized as watches–such as the Apple Watch and Samsung Gear–the odd fitness application wristband, bits of jewelry, even a hat. However, for the most part smart clothing has remained elusive.

The research by ACES has delivered an opening for power storage in fibers, something that allows powering of such textile-based sensors, which opens up a variety of applications.

Already numerous research groups have developed concepts for producing power with clothing, such as Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in Canada, which sought to make flat, textile-like batteries. And also Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, South Korea, where a fabric technology has been researched that allows the harvesting of energy from movement.

Put all of these technologies together, including the one from ACES, and there’s the real possibility of a shirt that could communicate heartrate and breathing diagnostics to a fitness band or smartphone. It also means that it could be possible to produce a shirt that could act as a Holter monitor, a portable device used to monitor electrical activity in the heart–while such a monitor-shirt would be mostly useful for heart patients, it could also be useful for getting discrete information for athletes and fitness aficionados.

This sort of medical innovation could also be used to monitor the movement of joints (elbows, knees, ankles, etc.) which could certainly be helpful for runners and other athletes, but also for physical therapy. During any given session (walk or run) the range of motion of a joint over time could reveal underlying information regarding the healing or mobility of the joint.

Further details on the fabric-sensor technology

Readers seeking the academic papers published on this subject should look to “Knitted Strain Sensor Textiles of Highly Conductive All Polymeric Fibers” recently published in Applied Materials and Interfaces and “3-D Braided Yarns to Create Electrochemical Cells” as accepted for publication in Electrochemistry Communications.

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