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Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created the first digitally functional fiber that can sense, store, analyze, and infer activities after being sewn into a shirt.

Yoel Fink is a professor in the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the principal researcher of the Electronic Research Laboratory, and the senior author of the study. He said that digital fibers expand the possibilities of fabrics to reveal the background patterns hidden in the human body. It can be used for body function monitoring, medical inference and early disease detection.

Or, one day you might store your wedding music in the dress you wear on important days-I'll describe it in detail later.

Fink and his colleagues described the characteristics of today's digital optical fiber on Nature Communications. So far, electronic fibers have been analog—carrying continuous electrical signals—not digital, where discrete bits of information can be encoded and processed with 0 and 1.

"This work enables for the first time a fabric that can store and process data digitally, adds a new dimension of information content to the textile, and allows verbatim programming of the fabric," Fink said.

MIT doctoral student Gabriel Loke and MIT postdoctoral fellow Tural Khudiyev are the main authors of the paper. Other co-authors: MIT Postdoctoral Wei Yan; MIT undergraduates Brian Wang, Stephanie Fu, Ioannis Chatziveroglou, Yamantak Payra, Yorai Shaoul, Johnny Fung, and Itamar Chinn; John Joannopoulos, MIT Francis Wright Davis Chair Professor of Physics and Director of the Soldier Nanotechnology Institute; Zhou Pinwen, a master student at Harrisburg University of Technology; and Anna Gitelson-Kahn, associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. The textile work is promoted by Professor Anais Missakian, who serves as the Pevaroff-Cohn Family Endowed Textile Chair at RISD.

The new fiber is made by putting hundreds of square silicon miniature digital chips into preforms, which are then used to make polymer fibers. By precisely controlling the polymer flow, the researchers were able to create a fiber with continuous electrical connections between chips within a length of tens of meters.

The fiber itself is thin and soft, it can be passed through a needle and sewn into a fabric without breaking at least 10 times. According to Loke, “When you put it in your shirt, you don’t feel it at all. You don’t know where it is.”

He said that manufacturing digital fibers "opens up opportunities in different fields and actually solves some of the problems of functional fibers."

For example, it provides a way to control individual elements in the fiber from a point at the end of the fiber. "You can think of our optical fiber as a corridor, the elements are like rooms, and each room has its own unique digital room number," Loke explained. The research team designed a digital addressing method that allows them to "open" the function of one element without having to open all the elements.

Digital optical fiber can also store a lot of information in memory. Researchers can write, store and read information on the optical fiber, including a 767 KB full-color short film file and a 0.48 megabyte music file. Files can be stored for two months in the event of a power failure.

Loke said that when they conceived "crazy ideas" for fibers, they thought of applications such as wedding dresses, storing digital wedding music in the weaving of their fabrics, and even writing the creation story of the fiber into its components.

Fink pointed out that MIT's research works closely with the RISD textile department led by Misakian. Gitelson-Kahn incorporated digital fibers into the sleeves of knitted garments, paving the way for the creation of the first digital garments.

By including a neural network of 1,650 connections in the fiber memory, the fiber also takes a few steps toward artificial intelligence. After sewing it on the armpit of the shirt, the researchers used the fiber to collect surface temperature data from the person wearing the shirt for 270 minutes and analyzed how the data corresponds to different physical activities. Based on these data for training, the fiber can determine the activities of the person wearing it with 96% accuracy.

Researchers say that adding artificial intelligence components to the fiber further increases its possibilities. Loke said that over time, fabrics with digital components can collect a lot of information all over the body, and these "rich data" are very suitable for machine learning algorithms.

"This type of fabric can provide open source data in quantity and quality for extracting new body patterns that we didn't know before," he said.

With this analytical capability, fibers can one day perceive and remind people of health changes in real time, such as respiratory decline or arrhythmia, or provide athletes with muscle activity or heart rate data during training.

The optical fiber is controlled by a small external device, so the next step is to design a new chip as a microcontroller that can be connected to the inside of the optical fiber.

"When we can do this, we can call it a fiber optic computer," Locke said.

This research was supported by the US Army Soldier Nanotechnology Institute, the National Science Foundation, the US Army Research Office, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Ocean Fund and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed new programmable fibers that can help turn clothes into wearable computers, reports Kyle Mizokami of Popular Mechanics. "Polymer fibers contain hundreds of tiny silicon microchips, and once they are powered on, they can maintain tens of meters of digital connections," Mizokami wrote.

Forbes contributor Eric Tegler focused on how MIT researchers developed optical fibers with digital capabilities. “Individuals wearing clothing with digital fibers can receive alerts about important information about their physiology and environmental exposure, and share health/injury and location data with support forces,” Tegler explained.

UPI reporter Brooks Hays wrote that researchers at MIT and other institutions have developed a programmable digital optical fiber that can capture, store, and analyze data. Hays wrote that the technology can be "used with machine learning algorithms and used to make smart fabrics to record health data and assist in medical diagnosis."

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