COLUMBUS – A shirt that monitors your vital signs? A hat that records your brain activity? Researchers at OSU working on wearable electronics say they have reached a milestone in their efforts to integrate electronic components such as sensors and computer memory devices into clothing.
Scientists at the ElectroScience Laboratory at Ohio State say they are now able to embroider circuits into fabric with 0.1 mm precision, the perfect size to be used in the design of functional “e-textiles” that gather, store, or transmit digital information.
The technology could lead to shirts that act as antennas for your smart phone or tablet, workout clothes that monitor your fitness level or a bandage that tells your doctor how well the tissue beneath it is healing.
Lab director John Volakis and research scientist Asimina Kiourti are working on fibers that would be used in a flexible fabric cap that senses activity in the brain to make brain implants, which are under development to treat conditions from epilepsy to addiction, more comfortable by eliminating the need for external wiring on the patient’s body.
The two refined their patented fabrication method to create prototype wearables at a fraction of the cost and in half the time as they could only two years ago.
One of their proposals includes an approach to creating colorful electronic textile shapes, which they illustrated with a “Block O” design that uses non-conductive scarlet and gray thread embroidered among the silver wires “to demonstrate that e-textiles can be both decorative and functional,” Kiourti said.
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The “e-textiles” are created in the lab in part on the type of tabletop sewing machine used by fabric artisans and hobbyists. Like other modern sewing machines, it embroiders thread into fabric automatically based on a pattern loaded via a computer file. The researchers substitute the thread with fine silver metal wires