Sewn into Garments, Robot Fibers Monitor Your Breathing
See how "smart" clothing can help athletes and singers with their breath control. A robotic fiber from MIT senses its own deformation and uses that data to provide immediate health feedback to a wearer.
“We eventually were able to achieve both the sensing and the modes of actuation that we wanted in the textile, to record and replay the complex movements that we could capture from an expert singer’s physiology and transpose it to a nonsinger, a novice learner’s body," says Ozgun Kilic Afsar , visiting doctoral student and research affiliate at MIT.
Transcript
00:00:00 NARRATOR: A team of researchers out of the MIT Media Lab, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and Uppsala University have designed a soft robotic fiber that can sense its own physical deformation and mechanically respond to it. This smart fiber can bend, stretch, curl, and pulse on demand, even providing immediate feedback to the user. Similar to typical polyester yarn,
00:00:24 this fiber can be woven into fabrics turning an everyday piece of clothing into a kinetic garment that responds to different stimuli by the human body. This technology, the researchers say, could even be used in the medical field to monitor breathing and help patients regulate respiratory actions in post recovery. OZGUN KILIC AFSAR: I think it's really important to get our wearable technology to speak the language of our body.
00:00:48 In that sense, soft robotic fibers, fabrics, and garments make a great medium to work with as they can be really expressive and very human like in the type of feedback they provide. NARRATOR: The fiber they call OmniFiber consists of a hollow channel in the center, which allows the fluid medium to run through it, in this case, compressed air. The compressed air is controlled by a miniaturized wearable control platform called Flow IO.
00:01:13 It operates similarly to an electrical circuit. But instead of electricity, it programs air by controlling the pressure and flow rate. Surrounding the elastomeric hollow chamber are a series of layers including a silicone-based, ultra stretchable sensor layer and a tubular braided polymer outer layer similar to a mesh. The design is so specific that by controlling the parameters of this outer interlocking mesh-like layer, one can mechanically program the motion of the fiber.
00:01:41 OZGUN KILIC AFSAR: Compared to existing pneumatic artificial muscles, our work combines multiple functionalities into a comprehensive system design, such as the fiber being sensor integrated, therefore, having robotic functionalities or being as small as half a millimeter of diameter, which is kind of like a medium-thick polyester yarn and, most importantly, being machine netable to scale up to full-body robotic garments. NARRATOR: Currently, they have a working prototype of an upper body garment that has
00:02:11 a kinesthetic or tangible approach to teaching people how to sing. Various parts of the garment control areas of the body, such as laces up the back that can pull the spine into the correct position and fibers woven into other parts that expand and contract guiding the user to breathe a certain way. OZGUN KILIC AFSAR: Breathing has this invisible and intangible physiology, which I think makes it really interesting to work with.
00:02:36 However, as breathing is a vital bodily function, we see this general purpose upper body garment being adapted for different use cases too, such as post-surgery or post-COVID breathing recovery and potentially for patients suffering from sleep apnea. NARRATOR: Their next step is to make the fabrication pipeline completely automated and continuous to achieve longer strands of robotic fibers for industrial use. They are also experimenting with different fluid media
00:03:04 for adding new functions such as an on-demand stiffness change to the fiber. [MUSIC PLAYING]