The most promising technologies today are wearable devices. They cover the whole spectrum of gadgets – from smartwatches and fitness bracelets to more professional devices that can measure all kinds of physical indicators and monitor a person’s health. What about clothing that can detect human movement and control some important functions? These clothes were created by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from the Laboratory of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. It uses special fibers that allow you to “feel” the movement of a person through touch. In the future, it could offer athletes feedback to improve exercise technique.
Scientists believe that their development can be used for sports training and rehabilitation. Intelligent fibers can determine a person’s posture: whether he is sitting, walking, or performing other movements. In addition, they can passively monitor health conditions, providing additional safety measures for people in need of help. For example, in special institutions, this would make it possible to warn staff if a patient loses consciousness and falls.
MIT has developed several clothing prototypes, including socks, gloves, and vests. The so-called tactile electronics use typical textile fibers and a small amount of specially made pressure-sensitive fibers. Their key advantage is that, unlike many existing electronic wearable devices, such material can be used in traditional large-scale clothing production. Machine knitted tactile fabrics are soft, stretchable, breathable and can take on a wide variety of shapes.
“It was difficult to design a mass-produced wearable device that provided very accurate data from multiple sensors. When you manufacture arrays of sensors, some will not work, others will perform worse than others. That is why we have developed a self-correction mechanism that uses a machine learning algorithm to recognize and adjust when certain sensors are out of baseline and out of specification, ”said study lead author Luo.
Created by the team, the socks are able to predict movements based on different sequences of tactile footprints, while the vest can determine the wearer’s posture, activity, and the texture of the surface it touches. Researchers believe that athletes can use it to record their posture, and in the future, such smart clothes can be used in robotics so that robots can learn certain movements and actions using data from wearable devices.
It is worth noting that MIT’s work was funded in part by the Toyota Research Institute. The material was published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Electronics.
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