The clothes you wear are not smart – there are no sensors in the cotton and synthetic yarn blends. But scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have a different subject in mind.
MIT researchers used a uniquely designed plastic yarn to create a knitted textile, called 3DKnITS, interspersed with pressure sensors. In their experiments, they used this material to make shoes and mats. They also paired it with a hardware and software system (including a machine learning component) that measured and interpreted the incoming pressure sensing data, and used them to predict human movements. Their design will be described at the IEEE Society of Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference.
Smart textiles that can understand how users are moving may be useful in healthcare, for example, for monitoring behavior or movement after an injury. They could be worn by athletes to get feedback on their movements, or they could be used to create a better video game interface.
During their experiments, the researchers connected the textile to a Minecraft video game, using it as a controller to move through the virtual world. It could detect whether the user wanted left or right perturbation depending on the leg they were standing on and whether they wanted to jump, walk or run.
They also used the mats as part of a yoga practice, so they could see how well he found postures like eagles, trees, or warriors, based on the pressure distribution he was perceiving on the textile surface.
For the fabric, there is an active pressure sensor at each point where two strands intersect. A wireless circuit scans and measures the force applied by each sensor. The pressure input is displayed as a heat map on a connected computer screen, and that image is fed to a deep learning system, which is trained to use the heat map to predict posture, posture or movement. Following the training, the researchers claim that the system is capable of classifying physical activities such as walking, running, and push-ups with 99.6 percent accuracy. It is also capable of nailing down seven yoga poses with 98.7 percent accuracy.
The team claims that they can also form these textiles into socks, sleeves, and much more. They could also make a custom outfit by scanning parts of the human body 3D, or 3D printing, and then evaporating or heating the textile to give it the desired shape. In another creative endeavor, the team made a magical carpet of textiles, one that retains music that alters soundscapes according to the dancer’s steps.
