A material that reacts to the movements of our body
The technology, known as OmniFiber, is being developed by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Uppsala University and the Royal Swedish Institute of Technology.
It takes the form of inexpensive stretchable filamentous fibers with an outer braided polymer shell, an underlying layer of soft material that defines stretching or compression as a change in electrical resistance, and an internal elastomeric tube containing a fluid medium – compressed air or water. The fibers are thin and flexible enough that they can be sewn, woven or knitted into fabric webs using existing commercial textile equipment.When a person wearing tight clothing made of this fabric breathes or moves in any other way, the fibers can measure the extent and location of this movement. The attached compressor can subsequently reproduce this pressure in the fibers, allowing another user to experience the sensation of another person breathing.
It is also assumed that clothing consisting of fibers can help patients who have undergone surgery or respiratory diseases to restore proper breathing.
In the course of the concept tests carried out so far, corset underwear made of fibers has been successfully used to track and reproduce the movement of the respiratory muscles of an opera singer when she sang.”In the end, we were able to achieve both the sensations and the triggering modes that we wanted in textiles in order to record and reproduce the complex movements that we caught from the physiology of an experienced singer and transfer them to a beginner,” says Ozgun Kilich Afsar from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In this way, we don’t just get knowledge from an expert, but we can tactilely transfer it to someone who is just learning.”
It is planned that the OmniFiber technology will be refined and, possibly, will be used to train movements in disciplines such as calligraphy or dancing. It was presented this week at an online conference dedicated to software and user interface technologies by the Association for Computing Machinery.
