Acoustic waves traveling through your smart shirt
ETHZ researchers has come up with a completely new perspective on Smart Shirts
Using electronics for sensoring your movements is the traditional way to turn your dump smelly T shirt into something smart, but ETHZ researchers are developing a completely new technology.
Acoustic waves traveling through glass fibre woven into the fabric is used to measure all your movements. Using glas fibre is lighter, more breathable and easier to wash.
The researchers call their development SonoTextiles. They have transformed normal fabrics into smart sensors that react to touch, pressure and movement. “While research has already been conducted into smart textiles based on acoustics, we are the first to explore the use of glass fibre in combination with signals that use different frequencies,” explains Yingqiang Wang, the first author of the study that has been published Nature Electronics.
With each fibre working on a different sound frequency it is relatively easy to determine what movements are made and where in the shirt.
When a glass fibre moves, the length of the acoustic waves passing through it changes, as they lose energy. In the case of a T-shirt, this can be caused by body movement or even breathing. “We used frequencies in the ultrasonic range, around 100 kilohertz – well beyond the range of human hearing, which is between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz,” Wang emphasises.
More information here.
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