Researchers from MIT described the characteristics of digital fibers in Nature Communications. So far electronic fibers have been analog and carried continuous electrical signals rather than digital ones, in which discrete bits of information can be encoded and processed in 0 and 1. Now this project has first produced the fabric with the capabilities of digital storage and data processing, adding a new content dimension of information to the textiles, so that the fabrics can be programmed literally.

This new fiber is created by placing hundreds of square silicon microscopic digital chips into a preform, and then used to create a polymer fiber. By accurately controlling the flow of polymer, researchers can create a fiber with continuous electrical connection between chips of tens of meters. The fiber itself is very thin and elastic, which can be sewn to the fabric with a needle and washed at least 10 times without breaking. You don't even feel it when placing it in your shirt.

It provides a method to control each element in the fiber from a point at the end of the fiber. You can imagine the optical fiber as a corridor, and each element is like a room with its own unique digital room number. The research group devises a digital addressing method that enables them to turn on the function of one element rather than all the elements.

Digital optical fiber can also store a large amount of information in memory. Researchers can write in, store and read information on the optical fiber, including a 767 KB full-color video file and a 0.48 MB music file. These files can be stored for two months without power supply.

The fiber has also taken a step forward in artificial intelligence, which includes a neural network consisting of 1,650 connections in the fiber memory. After stitching it on the armpit part of a shirt, researchers use the fiber to collect the body surface temperature data of people wearing the shirt for 270 minutes, and then analyze how these data correspond to different physical activities. This training data enable the fiber to determine what is a man who wears it doing with 96% accuracy.

With this analytical capability, one day the fibers can sense and alert people to health changes such as decreased breathing or irregular heartbeats in real time, or provide the data of muscle activation or heart rate to athletes during training.

Source: TechEdge