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Engineers create a programmable fiber Engineers create a programmable fiber In a first, the digital fiber contains memory, temperature sensors, and a trained neural network program for inferring physical activity. Becky Ham | MIT News correspondent Publication Date: June 3, 2021 Press Inquiries Press Contact: Abby Abazorius Email: abbya@mit.edu Phone: 617-253-2709 MIT News Office Media Download fabric on arm | Download Image Caption: MIT researchers have created the first fabric-fiber to have digital capabilities, ready to collect, store and analyze data using a neural network. Credits: Image: Anna Gittelson. Photo by Roni Cnaani. fabric on arm | Download Image Caption: "This work presents the first realization of a fabric with the ability to store and process data, adding a new information content dimension to textiles and allowing fabrics to be programmed literally," using a single process to connect hundreds of digital devices within a long flexible fiber, Fink says. Credits: Image: Anna Gittelson. Photo by Roni Cnaani. digital fibers on green fabric | Download Image Caption: A close-up photograph of the digital fibers on green fabric. Credits: Image: Anna Gittelson. Photo by Roni Cnaani. single fiber thread | Download Image Caption: A close-up photograph shows the fiber threading through a needle. Credits: Image: Pin-Wen Chou. Photo by Pin-Wen Chou. *Terms of Use: Images for download on the MIT News office website are made available to non-commercial entities, press and the general public under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license. You may not alter the images provided, other than to crop them to size. A credit line must be used when reproducing images; if one is not provided below, credit the images to "MIT." Close fabric on arm Caption: MIT researchers have created the first fabric-fiber to have digital capabilities, ready to collect, store and analyze data using a neural network. Credits: Image: Anna Gittelson. Photo by Roni Cnaani. fabric on arm Caption: "This work presents the first realization of a fabric with the ability to store and process data, adding a new information content dimension to textiles and allowing fabrics to be programmed literally," using a single process to connect hundreds of digital devices within a long flexible fiber, Fink says. Credits: Image: Anna Gittelson. Photo by Roni Cnaani. digital fibers on green fabric Caption: A close-up photograph of the digital fibers on green fabric. Credits: Image: Anna Gittelson. Photo by Roni Cnaani. single fiber thread Caption: A close-up photograph shows the fiber threading through a needle. Credits: Image: Pin-Wen Chou. Photo by Pin-Wen Chou. Previous image Next image MIT researchers have created the first fiber with digital capabilities, able to sense, store, analyze, and infer activity after being sewn into a shirt. Yoel Fink, who is a professor in the departments of materials science and engineering and electrical engineering and computer science, a Research Laboratory of Electronics principal investigator, and 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. Or, you might someday store your wedding music in the gown you wore on the big day -- more on that later. Fink and his colleagues describe the features of the digital fiber today in Nature Communications. 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," Fink says. MIT PhD student Gabriel Loke and MIT postdoc Tural Khudiyev are the lead authors on the paper. Other co-authors MIT postdoc Wei Yan; MIT undergraduates Brian Wang, Stephanie Fu, Ioannis Chatziveroglou, Syamantak Payra, Yorai Shaoul, Johnny Fung, and Itamar Chinn; John Joannopoulos, the Francis Wright Davis Chair Professor of Physics and director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT; Harrisburg University of Science and Technology master's student Pin-Wen Chou; and Rhode Island School of Design Associate Professor Anna Gitelson-Kahn. The fabric work was facilitated by Professor Anais Missakian, who holds the Pevaroff-Cohn Family Endowed Chair in Textiles at RISD. Memory and more The new fiber was created by placing hundreds of square silicon microscale digital chips into a preform that was then used to create a polymer fiber. By precisely controlling the polymer flow, the researchers were able to create a fiber with continuous electrical connection between the chips over a length of tens of meters. The fiber itself is thin and flexible and can be passed through a needle, sewn into fabrics, and washed at least 10 times without breaking down. According to Loke, "When you put it into a shirt, you can't feel it at all. You wouldn't know it was there." Making a digital fiber "opens up different areas of opportunities and actually solves some of the problems of functional fibers," he says. For instance, it offers a way to control individual elements within a fiber, from one point at the fiber's end. "You can think of our fiber as a corridor, and the elements are like rooms, and they each have their own unique digital room numbers," Loke explains. The research team devised a digital addressing method that allows them to "switch on" the functionality of one element without turning on all the elements. A digital fiber can also store a lot of information in memory. 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 they were dreaming up "crazy ideas" for the fiber, Loke says, they thought about applications like a wedding gown that would store digital wedding music within the weave of its fabric, or even writing the story of the fiber's creation into its components. Fink notes that the research at MIT was in close collaboration with the textile department at RISD led by Missakian. Gitelson-Kahn incorporated the digital fibers into a knitted garment sleeve, thus paving the way to creating the first digital garment. On-body artificial intelligence The fiber also takes a few steps forward into artificial intelligence by including, within the fiber memory, a neural network of 1,650 connections. After sewing it around the armpit of a shirt, the researchers used the fiber to collect 270 minutes of surface body temperature data from a person wearing the shirt, and analyze how these data corresponded to different physical activities. Trained on these data, the fiber was able to determine with 96 percent accuracy what activity the person wearing it was engaged in. Adding an AI component to the fiber further increases its possibilities, the researchers say. Fabrics with digital components can collect a lot of information across the body over time, and these "lush data" are perfect for machine learning algorithms, Loke says. "This type of fabric could give quantity and quality open-source data for extracting out new body patterns that we did not know about before," he says. With this analytic power, the fibers someday could sense and alert people in real-time to health changes like a respiratory decline or an irregular heartbeat, or deliver muscle activation or heart rate data to athletes during training. The fiber is controlled by a small external device, so the next step will be to design a new chip as a microcontroller that can be connected within the fiber itself. "When we can do that, we can call it a fiber computer," Loke says. This research was supported by the U.S. Army Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies, National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Office, the MIT Sea Grant, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Share this news article on: * Twitter * Facebook * LinkedIn * Reddit * Print Related Links * Yoel Fink * Gabriel Loke * Fibers@MIT * Advanced Functional Fabrics of America * Department of Materials Science and Engineering * Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science * School of Engineering Related Topics * DMSE * Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs) * Research * Electronics * Technology and society * Internet of things * Materials Science and Engineering * Nanoscience and nanotechnology * Artificial intelligence * Sensors * National Science Foundation (NSF) * School of Engineering Related Articles In this photograph of fabric, you can see the green light of functional fibers. "No human-made objects are more ubiquitous or exposed to more vital data than the clothes we all wear," says doctoral student Gabriel Locke. "Wouldn't it be great if we could somehow teach our fabrics to sense, store, analyze, extract and communicate this potentially useful information?" 3 Questions: The rapidly unfolding future of smart fabrics Using the 3D printing method developed by the MIT researchers, a structure such as this model airplane wing could have both light emitters and light detectors embedded in the material, so that it could continuously detect any micro-cracks as they begin to form. Engineers develop multimaterial fiber "ink" for 3-D-printed devices Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA) is connecting research in fibers, fabrics and textiles with industry players to create innovative manufacturing processes. Fabrics poised to become the new software With an enthusiastic team, Yoel Fink, a professor of materials science and electrical engineering and CEO of Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA), a $300 million institute on the edge of campus, is shaping a new destiny for fabrics. 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