A team of scientists at Boston University has developed a metamaterial that can be patterned onto clothing to form a scalable, customisable network, enabling communication between near-field reading devices and battery-free sensing nodes placed within the network.
Ongoing work on ‘textile muscles’ has been further strengthened as researchers develop haptic sleeves that give an extra boost during heavy lifting, enable ‘remote’ hugs, help the visually impaired navigate the urban environment, and also complement VR in gaming.
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 be implemented to suit wide-ranging applications.
The US Navy has engaged two tech-science solutions companies to come up with new generations of smart textiles for wearable electronics and computing as part of its SMART ePANTS project.
