While smart clothing has promised to allow garments to monitor a person’s health or to seamlessly communicate with portable devices, the clothing must also be able to survive multiple cycles in the laundry. As such, researchers at Purdue University have developed a way to transform ordinary clothing into battery-free wearables that are resistant to the hazards of laundry.
Smart clothing, also known as e-textiles, will outperform conventional passive garments due to the miniaturization of electronic circuits and sensors.
To withstand the washing machine, Purdue developed a new spray/sewing method to transform any conventional cloth items into battery-free wearables.
"By spray-coating smart clothes with highly hydrophobic molecules, we are able to render them repellent to water, oil and mud," said Ramses Martinez, an assistant professor in Purdue's School of Industrial Engineering and in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering in Purdue's College of Engineering. "These smart clothes are almost impossible to stain and can be used underwater and washed in conventional washing machines without damaging the electronic components sewn on their surface."
What can be created
Purdue engineers developed an ultrathin coating that allows the clothing to remain as flexible, stretchable and breathable as conventional cotton t-shirts. The smart clothes do not require batteries for powering but use energy harvested from Wi-Fi or radio waves in the environment.
Purdue developed a battery-free glove that illuminates its fingertips every time the user is near a live cable to warn of potential electric shocks. Another example of the smart clothing includes a mini cardiac monitoring system sewn on a washable sweatband, which monitors the health status of the wearer.
"Such wearable devices, powered by ubiquitous Wi-Fi signals, will make us not only think of clothing as just a garment that keeps us warm but also as wearable tools designed to help us in our daily life, monitor our health and protect us from accidents," Martinez said.
Additionally, the smart clothing could transmit information about the posture and motion of the wearer through a mobile app, allowing machines to understand human intent without the need for other interfaces or how a user interacts with devices or plays video games.
Purdue said the clothing can also be fabricated using conventional large-scale sewing facilities that will help to accelerate the development and commercialization of the e-textiles.
The full research can be found in the journal ScienceDirect.
