Engineers from MIT worked with people from the Rhode Island School of Design to create a fabric that can capture sound and turn it into electric signals. The item, called an “acoustic fabric,” works like a microphone. The resulting cloth, aside from being able to detect and convert sounds, is soft, durable, and comfortable.
This special cloth was developed from a flexible fiber, a “piezoelectric” material that produces an electrical signal when bent or mechanically deformed. The special trait of this material enables the fabric to convert sound vibrations into electrical signals. According to Wei Yan, the lead author of the study, their invention has a lot of potential uses. “Wearing an acoustic garment, you might talk through it to answer phone calls and communicate with others,” says Yan, who is now an assistant professor at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “In addition, this fabric can imperceptibly interface with the human skin, enabling wearers to monitor their heart and respiratory condition in a comfortable, continuous, real-time, and long-term manner.”
Image credit: Greg Hren
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