Imagine being an athlete and being able to determine you are dehydrated. Not by feeling dizzy, lightheaded, or getting cramps, but by your jersey changing from a light red to a dark red. Or not needing to check the air quality on your computer or watch, but rather knowing in real-time that the air quality outside is not safe to breathe because of your shirt changes from blue to black. A group of researchers at Tufts University may have just taken the first steps to make this a reality.
Wearable technology is an ever-expanding consumer market. It is projected in the coming years the wearable technology market will be worth billions of dollars.1 This increased consumer demand has directly affected an increase in research activity in developing materials that can be used in wearable technology. The types of materials used in wearable technology are currently fairly limited to hard and rigid materials. The electronic components and their casings that are incorporated in wearables are made out of hard plastics or metals. These materials are great for wearables like smartwatches, health monitors, and glasses they are limiting in textile applications.
In June 2020, an article was published in Advanced Materials about a bioinspired innovation in the wearable technology space that addresses this issue. A research group led by Fiorenzo Omenetto, Silklab used a protein from silk called silk fibroin to make inks that can sense changes in a person’s body and environment. Silk fibroin is a commonly used biomaterial that serves as a structural protein in silk fibers. In their wearable technology innovation, the Silklab took the silk fibroin and used it to encapsulate biological sensing molecules that have color-changing capabilities.
The initial iteration of this work involved the development of ink to be used by an inkjet printer.2 To make the technology more scalable they modified the ink so that it can be used in screen printing.3
“act like a protective ‘cocoon’ for biological materials”
Fiorenzo Omenetto speaking with Jillian Kramer for Scientific American
The researchers were able to transform various items like t-shirts, gloves, sensors, and patches into biologically active sensors. Printing their technology on these articles they were able to design the special sensors. The sensors have the potential to be designed to detect a lot of different biological and environmental changes. Some examples that were given in the paper were skin dehydration and fatigue level. A specific that they demonstrated was incorporating several pH sensors on a t-shirt. After the t-shirt was patterned with the pH sensors they monitored the pH level of the person’s sweat. They were able to detect the reduction in the pH of a person’s sweat to reflect the production of acidic molecules that can indicate muscle fatigue.
In the case of a T-shirt, the wearer ‘paints’ the shirt [through] exercise—with colors correlating to the acidity distribution of their sweat
Fiorenzo Omenetto speaking with Jillian Kramer for Scientific American
The researchers acknowledged there are currently some limitations with the technology. A specialized camera is necessary to resolve some of the color changes and environmental conditions like lighting can also affect the ability to detect the color change. Despite the limitations, this work is very promising. As more research is done there may be even more pieces of apparel and sensing applications that are developed.
1Kalinauckas, A.: ‘Wearable Technology’, Engineering & Technology, 2015, 10, (4), p. 36-43, DOI: 10.1049/et.2015.0416
IET Digital Library, https://digital-library.theiet.org/content/journals/10.1049/et.2015.0416
2https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adma.201570192
3 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adma.202001258
Scientific American Article, Color-Changing Ink Turns Clothes into Giant Chemical Sensors
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