Conference Alerts posted: " Someday our clothing may eavesdrop on the soundtrack of our lives, capturing the noises around and inside us. A new fiber acts as a microphone — picking up speech, rustling leaves and chirping birds — and turns those acoustic signals into electrical o"
Someday our clothing may eavesdrop on the soundtrack of our lives, capturing the noises around and inside us.
A new fiber acts as a microphone — picking up speech, rustling leaves and chirping birds — and turns those acoustic signals into electrical ones. Woven into a fabric, the material can even hear handclaps and faint sounds, such as its wearer's heartbeat, researchers report March 16 in Nature. Such fabrics could provide a comfortable, nonintrusive — even fashionable — way to monitor body functions or aid with hearing.
Acoustic fabrics have existed for perhaps hundreds of years, but they're used to dampen sound, says Wei Yan, a materials scientist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Fabric as a microphone is "totally a different concept," says Yan, who worked on the fabric while at MIT.
Piezoelectric materials have "huge potential" for applications from observing the function of bodies to monitoring the integrity of aircraft materials, says Vijay Thakur, a materials scientist at Scotland's Rural College in Edinburgh who was not part of this work. They've even been proposed for energy generation, but, he says, many uses have been limited by the tiny voltages they produce (SN: 10/1/15). The way the fibers are made in this fabric — sandwiching a blend of piezoelectric materials between other components, including a flexible, stretchy outer material — concentrates the energy from the vibrations into the piezoelectric layer, enhancing the signal it produces.
As a proof of concept, the team incorporated the fabric into a shirt, which could hear its wearer's heart like a stethoscope does. Used this way, the fabric microphone could listen for murmurs and may someday be able to provide information similar to an echocardiogram, an ultrasound of the heart, Thakur says. If it proves effective as a monitoring and diagnostic tool, placing such microphones into clothing may someday make it easier for doctors to track heart conditions in young children, who have trouble keeping still, he says.
The team also anticipates that fabric microphones could aid hearing and communication. Another shirt the team created had two piezoelectric fibers spaced apart on the shirt's back. Based on when each fiber picked up the sound, this shirt can be used to detect the direction a clap came from. And when hooked up to a power source, the fabric microphones can project sound as a speaker.
"For the past 20 years, we've been trying to introduce a new way of thinking about fabrics," Fink says. Beyond providing beauty and warmth, fabrics may help solve technological problems. And perhaps, Fink says, they can beautify technology too.
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5th European Meeting on Materials Science and Nanotechnology June 27-28, 2022 Zurich, Switzerland
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