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Wearables

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Engineers Fabricate A Chip-Free, Wireless Electronic “Skin”

Wearable sensors are ubiquitous thanks to wireless technology that enables a person’s glucose concentrations, blood pressure, heart rate, and activity levels to be transmitted seamlessly from sensor to smartphone for further analysis. Most wireless sensors today communicate via embedded Bluetooth chips that are themselves powered by small batteries. But these conventional chips and power sources will likely be too bulky for next-generation sensors, which are taking on smaller, thinner, more flexible forms. Now MIT engineers have devised a new kind of wearable sensor that communicates wirelessly without requiring onboard chips or batteries. Their design, detailed today in the journal Science, opens…
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New Programmable Materials Can Sense Their Own Movements

MIT researchers have developed a method for 3D printing materials with tunable mechanical properties, that sense how they are moving and interacting with the environment. The researchers create these sensing structures using just one material and a single run on a 3D printer. To accomplish this, the researchers began with 3D-printed lattice materials and incorporated networks of air-filled channels into the structure during the printing process. By measuring how the pressure changes within these channels when the structure is squeezed, bent, or stretched, engineers can receive feedback on how the material is moving. The method opens opportunities for embedding sensors…
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A Fabric That “Hears” Your Heartbeat

Having trouble hearing? Just turn up your shirt. That’s the idea behind a new “acoustic fabric” developed by engineers at MIT and collaborators at Rhode Island School of Design. The team has designed a fabric that works like a microphone, converting sound first into mechanical vibrations, then into electrical signals, similarly to how our ears hear. All fabrics vibrate in response to audible sounds, though these vibrations are on the scale of nanometers — far too small to ordinarily be sensed. To capture these imperceptible signals, the researchers created a flexible fiber that, when woven into a fabric, bends with…
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Intelligent Carpet Gives Insight Into Human Poses

The sentient Magic Carpet from Aladdin might have a new competitor. While it can’t fly or speak, a new tactile sensing carpet from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) can estimate human poses without using cameras, in a step towards  improving self-powered personalized healthcare, smart homes, and gaming. Many of our daily activities involve physical contact with the ground: walking, exercising, or resting. These embedded interactions contain a wealth of information that help us better understand people’s movements. Previous research has leveraged use of single RGB cameras, (think Microsoft Kinect), wearable omnidirectional cameras, and even plain old off the shelf webcams, but with the…
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Soft Robots Of The Future May Depend On New Materials That Conduct Electricity, Sense Damage And Self-Heal

Robots used to be restricted to heavy lifting or fine detail work in factories. Now Boston Dynamics’ nimble four-legged robot, Spot, is available for companies to lease to carry out various real-world jobs, a sign of just how common interactions between humans and machines have become in recent years. And while Spot is versatile and robust, it’s what society thinks of as a traditional robot, a mix of metal and hard plastic. Many researchers are convinced that soft robots capable of safe physical interaction with people – for example, providing in-home assistance by gripping and moving objects – will join…
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