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NEWS • TECHNOLOGY • 25 June 2021
Words by Laura Pitcher
Engineers Have Created New Programmable Digital Fiber
Engineers at MIT have created fiber that can store files in our clothes and sense our physical activity.
While many of us feel an emotional or personal connection to our clothing, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a digital fibre that can connect to us, physically. This is the world's first fiber with digital capabilities that can be incorporated into fabric, sensing, storing, analysing, and monitoring physiological functions. It’s even capable of storing music, videos or other files in clothing.
In a breakthrough that has the potential to revolutionize the wearable tech industry, the thin, flexible textile can be passed through a needle and sewn into fabrics, and can be washed at least ten times without breaking down. The team behind the development say this is the first example of an electronic fabric that can record digital rather than analogue data, meaning it can be programmed like any other digital device.
Yoel Fink, the senior author on the study, says digital fibers expand the possibilities for fabrics to uncover the context of hidden patterns in the human body that could be used for physical performance monitoring, medical inference, and early disease detection. When imagining other “crazy ideas” for the fiber, MIT PhD student Gabriel Loke (another lead author on the paper) says, they thought about applications like a wedding gown that would store digital wedding music within the weave of its fabric.
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During the study, detailed in an article published in Nature Communications, the researchers were able to write, store, and read information on the fiber, including a 767-kilobit full-color short movie file and a 0.48 megabyte music file. The files can be stored for two months without power. When incorporated into the armpit of a shirt, the shirt was able to collect 270 minutes of surface body temperature data from the wearer and analyse how it corresponded to different physical activities.
As other wearable tech pieces get closer to hitting shelves, like augmented reality glasses, this digital fiber’s advantage is in the surface area of the body that it can cover and monitor. The team plans to continue working on the technology to merge it into real world applications. While the practical outcome of this groundbreak technology still remains to be seen, there’s no doubt that it marks the beginning of a new, more wearable digital era.