The peculiarity of the “smart” fabric is that it consists of special threads that react to body heat and deform. This makes it possible to significantly increase the accuracy of the built-in pressure sensors.

How to create smart fabric?

The main tool for creating such a fabric is a special digital loom that knits ordinary fibers with functional threads. Multilayer textiles consist of two layers of electrically conductive yarn. A piezoresistive material is placed between these layers, which changes the resistance during compression. Following the given pattern, the machine knits the functional yarn in horizontal and vertical rows of material. A pressure sensor appears at the intersection of these fibers.

However, the threads are soft and flexible, so when a person moves, the layers slide and rub against each other. This creates interference and reduces the accuracy of the sensors. To solve this problem, the developers used thermoplastic threads, which begin to melt at temperatures above 70 degrees. Therefore, the multi-layer fabric is fused in a single layer and can keep its exact shape. This approach allowed engineers to avoid obstacles and also paved the way for creating three-dimensional forms that fit the wearer perfectly, such as shoes or socks.

After that, the engineers created a system to process the data from the pressure sensors. The wireless circuit scans rows and columns of matter woven into a grid and measures the resistance at each point. The pressure data was presented in the form of a heatmap, which was loaded into a machine learning model that could recognize body position or movement.

What applications could the “smart” fabric have?

The result is a mat that understands what the user is doing (walking, running, doing push-ups, etc.) with 99.6% accuracy and can recognize seven yoga poses with 98.7% accuracy. In addition to the mat, engineers created rags with 96 pressure sensors from smart fabric. With their help, they measured the pressure in different parts of the foot when hitting a soccer ball.

How does the “smart” fabric work: watch the video

The authors of the invention believe that smart tissue could be particularly useful for physiotherapy and prosthetics where it is important to accurately determine the degree of pressure.