Smart textiles measure your movements

In recent years there have been exciting breakthroughs inwearable technologies,就像smartwatchesthat can monitor your breathing and blood oxygen levels. But what about a wearable that can detect how you move as you do a physical activity or play a sport, and could potentially even offer feedback on how to improve your technique? And, as a major bonus, what if the wearable were something you’d actually already be wearing, like a shirt of a pair of socks?

That’s the idea behind a new set of MIT-designed clothing that use special fibers to sense a person’s movement via touch. Among other things, the researchers showed that their clothes can actually determine things like if someone is sitting, walking, or doing particular poses.

The group from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) says that their clothes could be used for athletic training andrehabilitation. With patients’ permission they could even help passivelymonitorthe health of residents in assisted-care facilities and determine if, for example, someone has fallen or is unconscious.

The researchers have developed a range of prototypes, from socks and gloves to a full vest. The team’s “tactile electronics” use a mix of more typical textile fibers alongside a small amount of custom-made functional fibers that sense pressure from the person wearing the garment.

根据CSAIL的研究生Yiyue罗,key advantage of the team’s design is that, unlike many existing wearable electronics, theirs can be incorporated into traditional large-scale clothing production. The machine-knitted tactiletextilesare soft, stretchable, breathable, and can take a wide range of forms.

“传统上是很难to develop a mass-production wearable that provides high-accuracy data across a large number of sensors,” says Luo, lead author on a new paper. “When you manufacture lots ofsensorarrays, some of them will not work and some of them will work worse than others, so we developed a self-correcting mechanism that uses a self-supervisedmachine learningalgorithm to recognize and adjust when certain sensors in the design are off base.”

The team’s clothes have a range of capabilities. Their socks predict motion by looking at how different sequences of tactile footprints correlate to different poses as the user transitions from one pose to another. The full-sized vest can also detect the wearers' pose, activity, and the texture of the contacted surfaces.

The authors imagine a coach using the sensor to analyze people’s postures and give suggestions on improvement. It could also be used by an experienced athlete to record their posture so that beginners can learn from them. In the long term, they even imagine that robots could be trained to learn how to do different activities using data from the wearables.

“Imaginerobotsthat are no longer tactilely blind, and that have ‘skins’ that can provide tactile sensing just like we have as humans,” says corresponding author Wan Shou, a postdoc at CSAIL. “Clothing with high-resolution tactile sensing opens up a lot of exciting new application areas for researchers to explore in the years to come.”

The research was published inNature Electronics.