An international team of researchers have built a new kind of “robotic” fibre that is capable of sensing and reacting, can be made into clothing, and is compatible with human skin. The new textile, called OmniFiber by the researchers, is capable of providing immediate tactile feedback in the form of lateral stretch, pressure or vibration. According to scientists, OmniFiber-like fabrics could be used in clothes that can help patients recover from surgery or disease, and train singers and athletes using their haptic feedback mechanism. Garments made out of the fibre can sense the body movements and record them to play later. This opens a new portal of haptic learning for singers and athletes who can be trained using such garments who offer support guiding them to a more optimised body movement. According to scientists, using OmniFibers, they were able to sense and record a classically trained musician’s expertise in the form of their body movements and then replay the complex movements. The researchers then transposed the complex recorded movements to a novice learner’s body. The haptic feedback was recorded using the strain sensors built in the fibre.
“So, we are not just capturing this knowledge from an expert, but we are able to haptically transfer that to someone who is just learning,” said Ozgun Kilic Afsar, one of the researchers who built the fibres, in a statement. Afsar wanted to capture this expertise in a tangible form, she said. Afsar is working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a research affiliate and is a PhD student at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.
The fibres are narrow in size and use inexpensive material which makes them easy to structure in any fabric form. The fabric’s outer layer is based on a polyester-like material, making it compatible with human skin.
Capable of operating - stretching, applying pressure and vibrating - with a maximum speed of 150 mm/s and applying pressure up to 0.5MPa, which is about twice the amount of average tap water pressure. The fibre resembling a yarn strand has five layers with its innermost layer made of a fluid channel, which, after being activated by a fluidic system, controls the geometry of the fibres. The research was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s User Interface Software and Technology online conference held between October 10 to October 14.
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