A team of scientists specialising in biomedical engineering and medicine have developed embroiderable, multicolour, electroluminescent threads in blue, green, and yellow, that show compatibility with standard embroidery methods.
- The outcomes deliver a comprehensive toolkit to integrate light-emitting textiles into trendy customised crafts that can even be tailored for leisurewear, with diverse and flexible options.
- The scientists used the threads to stitch decorative designs onto a variety of consumer fabrics, without compromising their wearability or light-emitting capacity.
- They illuminated specific messages or designs on the consumer products for the purpose of developing emergency alerts on helmet liners and as physical hazard signs.
Light-emitting wearables: Light-emitting textiles have gained increased attention due to their capacity to create dynamic and interactive lighting effects to make them well-suited as wearable fashion in health care and for display purposes.
- Light-emitting diodes and other light sources such as electroluminescent thin films can be glued directly onto garments of interest. However, such approaches can still affect the inherent properties of the fabric, such as flexibility, wearability, and washability.
- However, recent advances in electroluminescent threads that can be woven or knitted have facilitated the integration of light-emitting textiles on a large-scale to include vast arrays of lighting lines or pixels.
- A versatile tool that can include light-emitting textiles into fashionable and customised crafts directly onto consumer fabrics can now be implemented to suit wide-ranging applications.
The development: Seungse Cho from the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, and his team have developed threads that are durable against folding, stretching, and machine washes, to satisfy the necessities of machine embroidery.
- To demonstrate the capacity of wearable displays, the scientists embroidered a 6 x 3 array of light-emitting pixels onto a commercial helmet liner as a football helmet equipped with an impact sensor. They aimed to detect potentially severe head impacts to alert the wearer of a potential concussion, with a real-time warning system. Such wearables can prevent and manage traumatic brain injury prevalent in collision sports, for the early detection and treatment of potential head impacts or concussions.
- The measurement setup contained a football helmet equipped with an accelerometer, microcontroller, relay, and power supplier. The construct also maintained a stretchable helmet liner with light emitting pixels, for real-time detection of impact severity.
- The team also applied mechanical impacts to a mannequin head with a dumbbell and classified the severity as mild, moderate, to severe. The experiments showed how the mechanical impact on the head could be visualised to detect early concussion management in sports or in situations that include the risk of danger in daily life.
