Washable Fiber Computer Could Transform the Future of Smart Clothing, Study Finds

A flexible fibre that can be a little smarter than you would like. Scientists have packed computing power into a flexible fibre the width of a cotton thread that can be washed and dried without damage. Described in Nano-Micro Letters, the advance means that clothes will now have a way to keep a check on a wearer's body temperature, retaining the body's warmth in cold conditions and serving as a personal cooling system in hot weather. The fibres contain capabilities for sensing, communication, storage, and computation. The team will need to scale up the technology to create a fabric-based computer network, and imagine wearables that monitor your health, or displays you can play around with, but it's a cool step forward.

Stretchable Fiber Computers Achieve 95% Accuracy in Motion Tracking Tests

According to the study, each elastic fibre is stretchable by up to 60% and embeds eight devices, including four sensors, a photodetector, temperature sensor, accelerometer, and photoplethysmogram sensor, alongside a microcontroller, communication modules, and power management.

For a test of the gadget, developed by the Swiss university ETH Zürich, four fibres were sewn to a piece of clothing, and full wearers carried out bodyweight exercises such as squats and planks. One fiber could pick up motion with 67 percent accuracy; with four fibres, the accuracy jumped to 95 percent.

In order to enhance MFCS, we have developed a multi-fibre online sensing system, where the fibres are organised to work as a team for collaborative sensing. The uploading sections of information include multiple trained neural networks specialised in biosignal analysis and the coordination of the multiple fibres working towards the online human-centric recognition.

The study zeroed in on the system's accuracy but also highlighted its limitations, and it ended with a to-do list for work that remains to be done to improve the speed of communication, lower energy use, and develop lower-latency protocols for fibre-based computing.

Scientists have created wearable technology that allows devices to be computer-controlled at the fibre level, paving the way for use in applications such as personal health monitoring and sports performance.