Sunday, June 06, 2021

Engineers create a programmable fiber

Amazing stuff! This is almost science fiction! After smart phones, smart textiles are next?

"MIT researchers have created the first fiber with digital capabilities, able to sense, store, analyze, and infer activity after being sewn into a shirt. ...
Until now, electronic fibers have been analog — carrying a continuous electrical signal — rather than digital, where discrete bits of information can be encoded and processed in 0s and 1s.
“This work presents the first realization of a fabric with the ability to store and process data digitally, adding a new information content dimension to textiles and allowing fabrics to be programmed literally,” ..."

"... Fibres containing digital devices could enable fabrics with digital system capabilities for applications in physiological monitoring, human-computer interfaces, and on-body machine-learning. Here, a scalable preform-to-fibre approach is used to produce tens of metres of flexible fibre containing hundreds of interspersed, digital temperature sensors and memory devices with a memory density of ~7.6 × 105 bits per metre. The entire ensemble of devices are individually addressable and independently operated through a single connection at the fibre edge, overcoming the perennial single-fibre single-device limitation and increasing system reliability. The digital fibre, when incorporated within a shirt, collects and stores body temperature data over multiple days, and enables real-time inference of wearer activity with an accuracy of 96% through a trained neural network with 1650 neuronal connections stored within the fibre.  ..."

Engineers create a programmable fiber | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology In a first, the digital fiber contains memory, temperature sensors, and a trained neural network program for inferring physical activity.

Presumably, this is the link to the underlying research article:

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