The constant developments witnessed in the wearable and smart textiles fields allowed us to get a glimpse of the future: in the last few years we have indeed seen garments that can communicate our feelings, can keep us warm or charge (and interact with) a small device such as a mobile phone.
Up until a few years ago such experiments would have ended in museums or they would have become the subject of exhibitions, but nowadays it is easy to find practical applications of such technlogies even in cheap products such as gloves that can be used with a smartphone. A group of researchers recently took things further by creating a data-storing fabric that does not employ any electronics or batteries.
The project - developed by a team from the University of Washington and described in a paper presented at the end of October at the Association for Computing Machinery's User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2017) - turns the fabric into a hard disk as the data is stored directly on the clothes.
The process is made possible by magnetizing off-the-shelf conductive thread (of the type already incorporated in basic products such as toys or accessories that light up): the team employed ordinary sewing machines to embroider fabric with the thread, then rubbed a magnet against the fabric, aligning the poles in either a positive or negative direction, which can correspond to the 1s and 0s in digital data. The team therefore encoded in it different forms of data including 2D images, letters, numbers and bit strings.
The information can be read using an instrument embedded in existing smartphones that enables navigation apps - the magnetometer. The experiments carried out by the team showed that magnetized fabric retains its data even after washing, drying and ironing and that a small accessory such as a glove made of magnetized fabric, can perform a series of actions on a mobile phone without event touching it.
The researchers also found that different embroidery styles (available through commercial embroidery software) produce different magnetic field strengths, and discovered that the two strongest designs are the 3D Satin and Circle stitches (this is an interesting point as a fashion designer in collaboration with a research team may create a special embroidery stitch to store specific data...).
The team therefore proceeded to design rudimentary pieces such as necklaces, ties, wristbands and belts with data storage capabilities and proved that they can be useful to enable authentication applications. These products could for example be used to replace pass codes, ID cards or keycards or to open doors with electronic locks.
You may argue this is not much different from RFID tags, but the fabrics developed by the University of Washington researchers can be read using any off-the-shelf magnetometer, while some RFID tags operate across the 120kHz - 10GHz band. Besides, each type of tag can only be read with a specialized reader that communicates on the exact same frequency, adheres to the same ISO/IEC 18000 standards and is compatible with any manufacturer-specific protocols. RFID readers also cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, while magnetometers are as cheap as $0.78 (10000x cheaper than some RFID readers; each magnetized fabric tag cost < $0.17).
The potential of conductive yarns has already been explored in other projects (think about wearable electronics including the Lilypad Arduino microcontroller and Google's Project Jacquard), but many technological garments still require on-board electronics or sensors to work.
This development may instead take the discourse to a new level: in future the researchers at Washington University would like to focus on developing custom textiles that generate stronger magnetic fields and are therefore capable of storing a higher density of data.
It would be interesting to start thinking about the applications this technology could have in specific fields or jobs: certain uniforms could incorporate magnetized patches embedded with the workers' access codes, while in medicine a discreet accessory made with magnetized fabric could be used by a patient to carry important personal information around. As usual, the possibilities for new and innovative technologies are endless, we just need researchers to keep on experimenting with them and find useful fields of application for their discoveries.
Comments