MIT Engineers Create Fabric That Stretches And Compresses For Perfect Respiration

Researchers at MIT and from Sweden have developed a new kind of fibre that can be embedded in fabrics that can detect how much it¡¯s being compressed or stretched.

MIT

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The fabric is also capable of providing immediate tactile feedback in the form of pressure, vibrations or lateral stretch, which could help athletes or singers, or even patients train to better control their breathing.

The fabric, which has multi-layered fibres dubbed OmniFibres, contains a fluid channel at its centre that gets activated thanks to a fluidic system. This controls the geometry of the fibres by pressurising and releasing a fluid medium like compressed air or water into the channel, making it behave like a muscle.

The fibre composite has five layers -- the innermost fluid channel, a silicone elastomeric tube which consists of the working fluid, a soft, stretchable sensor that detects strain as a change in electrical resistance, a braided polymer stretchable outer mesh that controls the outer dimension of the fibre and a non-stretchy filament to offer mechanical constraint on overall extensibility. The resulting composite fibres are thin, and can easily be either sewn, woven or even knitted using industry machines used commercially.

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MIT

According to Ozgun Kilic Afsar, a visiting doctoral student and research affiliate at MIT, conventional artificial muscle fibres are either thermally activated that can cause overheating or they are not as power-efficient. These also offer a slow response and recovery times. The OmniFibres is actually far advanced in its functionality.

To initially test the application of the material, the team developed a type of undergarment that singers can wear to monitor and playback the movement of respiratory muscles while offering kinesthetic feedback using the same fabric to tell the singer about the right posture and breathing patterns to get desired results.

MIT

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Afsar explained, ¡°We eventually were able to achieve both the sensing and the modes of actuation that we wanted in the textile, to record and replay the complex movements that we could capture from an expert singer¡¯s physiology and transpose it to a nonsinger, a novice learner¡¯s body. So, we are not just capturing this knowledge from an expert, but we are able to haptically transfer that to someone who is just learning.¡±

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