The Wonderful World of Wearables

We hear a lot about Industry 4.0 and how we can benefit from connecting our production equipment to other parts of the plant, or to the outside world. Now Industry 4.0 is coming to your closet – in the form of connected clothing and other wearable items – and even to fabric-based home interior items such as carpets, drapes, shades and more.

Sound like a futuristic fantasy? It’s not as far away as you might think. I recently spoke to Sasha Stolyarov, CEO of Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA), one of nine Manufacturing USA institutes. AFFOA has been a leader in research and development for fiber and fabric computing, a key to creating next-generation wearables – although Stolyarov prefers not to use that term.

“Our focus is on functional fibers and fabrics," he said. "Our mission is to rekindle the domestic textile industry through innovation. Taking an industry as old as the textiles industry and transforming it by introducing advanced materials, processes and applications has become a national movement that involves many universities and corporations. The big challenge is innovating in a space that has not seen much innovation in centuries. We are used to certain functionalities from textiles, and those functionalities are very different than what we expect from technology like cell phones or computers.”

Sasha Stolyarov, CEO of Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA)

Part of the persona, as it were, of AFFOA, is a collection of disparate expertise under one roof.

“You can’t have just textile companies innovating in textiles," Stolyarov said. "You can’t reignite innovation with expertise in just one area. You have to bring in electronics, photonics, software and coupling that with textiles, collaborate across these traditionally separate industries. Having all that expertise under one roof is what makes us unique.”

So what does fiber and fabric computing actually mean? Or even on a broader scale, advanced functional fibers and fabrics? One thing AFFOA has been working on is getting computer chips into fibers.

“Just a year and a half ago, we were making progress on getting light-emitting diodes and simple two-terminal devices into fibers and textiles," he said. "Now we are at a point where we can get tiny computer chips, tiny sensors that have multiple terminals on them, integrated into fibers, and ultimately into knitted or woven fabrics or composite materials.”

And it is not only computer chips they are working with. One example he shared is Nufabrx.

“They worked with us on one of our project calls and went from demonstration of a fabric that has chemicals embedded in it as therapeutic medication that can be released from that textile, to a full system you can purchase today in over 4,000 Walmarts. These are functional fabrics that act as a medication delivery platform that over time can help relieve pain. That’s an example of something that was a fantasy when it got started with two partners and that was developed in a fairly short amount of time, now employing 30 people.”

Nufabrx Medicated Knee Sleeve w/Capsaicin

Another example, more along the lines of computing, is another company AFFOA worked with that has product already available, BitRip. The company makes digital tape that you rip, stick and scan.

“It’s a digital tape that has a digital code on it, and you can stick it to any surface and assign information to that code," Stolyarov said. "It came out of AFFOA as an idea when we were thinking about wearables and clothes and backpacks and things like that. But it turned out this entrepreneur, Nicholas Dimitruk, figured out that putting it on tapes had a lot of interesting applications.”

As an example of how this Industry 4.0 connected tape might be used, one customer testimonial on the company’s website says, “Great tool for safety. See something unsafe, stick a piece, leave a voice memo on it, and tag it to safety. In an instant, [the] supervisor knows who called it in, time and GPS location, and what happened. One of many ways to use this stuff.”

In New Zealand, a company founded by chemist Simon McMaster, Footfalls & Heartbeats, developed a revolutionary and proprietary process for manufacturing smart fabric that uses nano-scale interactions within the textile to make the fabric itself the sensor, avoiding the need for wires or miniature electronics. Now located in the UK, the company sees one application as integration of its technology into compression bandages for use on chronic leg ulcers. Its sensing technology will allow for real-time monitoring of individual rehabilitation from musculoskeletal injuries. Again, just scratching the surface of the possibilities.

Right now, most of the developments are passive – that is, they don’t need to be connected to a power source. Another example of this type of passive technology is from CashCuff, “geek chic” shirts with contactless payment built into the cuff. Again, a passive application.

“Where you do need to connect to a power source, you have the issue of being able to integrate it so it is cost effective," Stolyarov said. "That’s why, for example, the Levi’s Google Jacquard jacket probably has only a few hundred manufactured, because each one takes manual connection of hundreds of wires, very expensive and cost prohibitive to scale up the volume. So the challenges that remain for the industry and for AFFOA and for our members is how do we keep pushing the boundaries of manufacturing such that five years from now it is possible to produce these products at scale, and we will start to see a larger market emerge?”

While you could, of course, attach a battery pack, no one wants to wear a clunky, heavy battery pack on their shirt. So that challenge still remains, and researchers from AFFOA and other organizations are working to solve it with a solution that is flexible like fabric but can deliver the needed power.

In a recent TexProcess Technical Textiles webinar, Professor Kyung Cheol Choi, Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering, KAIST, in South Korea, shared some of his research on fabric- and fiber-based OLEDs for textile displays, a different approach than we have been talking about up to this point. Professor Choi explained his belief that while much of the electronics industry has used rigid substrates to form electronics, in the future there will be more focus on flexible, stretchable and freeform electronics.

In his research, OLEDs, or organic LEDs, a type of light-emitting diode, are being placed on the surface of the fabric or fiber, as opposed to being contained within those materials as AFFOA is pursuing. The goal would be to incorporate a wide range of functionality in a way that is comfortable for the user and does not require multiple devices to acquire needed data, what he categorizes as a true wearable display.

Wearables come in many forms, and each can deliver different data points

His process, which is still in the lab, requires preparation of the surface of the textile to create a “textile platform” upon which the OLED layer can be placed. The idea is that the layer is very thin, but flexible and resistant to damage from bending, wrinkling or washing, and would not significantly affect the hand feel of the fabric. Examples he used are a “sleeve watch,” and a smart fashion display that could reflect time, date, heart rate and a phone call on cloth. In both cases, these wearable displays would be comfortable for the user and would not significantly change the fabric hand feel. But the question remains: What would the power source be?

As you can see, there is significant progress being made in fiber- and fabric-based computing, sensors and delivery of medications and other chemicals, but there are still barriers to overcome before they become widely available and replace today’s rigid computing devices, including cost, power supply and more. 

“For this technology to be successful in the future, you need to build in local memory or storage, but you also have to connect the fiber or fabric to the cloud, integrating not only the sensors themselves, but the local memory and communications capabilities," Stolyarov said. "For example, if I go out for a run, run for an hour, come home and automatically, with the click of a button or a voice command, I should be able to transfer data to the cloud – what was my average speed, how many calories did I burn, what was my heart rate, etc. That data would then be instantly available to me without a lot of effort. All of that has to be designed into the textiles. But once you have packaged microelectronics into textiles, the world is your oyster.

“Practically speaking, for the next few years, you will see low volume, niche and specialized application of functional textiles. The challenge to get to mass production has to do with overcoming the cost and manufacturing barriers at scale, and to figure out the power source challenges. The sky is the limit here. Every day there are new ideas. The challenge is figuring out what not to do.”

Editor’s Note: View the full video interview with Sasha Stolyarov [short URL]