The Hindu Business Line : Smart fabrics to make wearable computers a reality

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed computerised fabric patches which when put together in different ways can create a range of information-providing or environment-sensing objects such as a smart handbag or a belt.

Pune , Nov. 20

THE World Trade Organisation says that, with the lifting of import quotas next year, India would triple its share of the US clothing market. Captains of the Indian information technology industry assure us that the country has what it takes to be an IT super-power. Put the two together and you get smart fabrics - something that the country should be looking at.

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed computerised fabric patches which when put together in different ways can create a range of information-providing or environment-sensing objects such as a smart handbag or a belt.

According to the developers of these patches, Adrian Cable, Gauri Nanda and Michael Bove of the MIT Media Lab, each patch holds a functional unit of the system - a microprocessor, memory and either a radio transceiver, a sensor, a microphone, batteries or a display.

A patch can be populated with different components, ranging from Bluetooth transmitters to a cut-down PC motherboard.

To make it, the circuit board inside is coated with a hard transparent resin and padded with a thin layer of foam before being encapsulated in any chosen fabric. The patches are joined using Velcro modified to enable electrical as well as physical connections. Wires from the circuit board are attached to silver-coated contacts in the Velcro so that data and power can flow from one module to the other.

Users can fashion and refashion, using square or triangular patches, an endless variety of objects such as bags, belts, scarves and curtains.

Pervasive computing has been gaining traction for a while now. Some months ago, scientists at the Institute of Physical Electronics at the University of Stuttgart announced the development of synthetic fibres that could generate electricity when exposed to light. They pointed out that the fibres could be woven into machine-washable clothes to make the ultimate in portable solar cells and, thereby, boost the development of wearable computers.

Quite simply, their discovery meant that people can look forward to their jacket or sweater to provide the power they need to operate a palmtop computer, a cell phone or an MP3 player - as long as they are not skulking around in dark places.

However, a basic problem that confronted those in the field of pervasive computing till recently was the impossibility of configuring wearable computers and sensors to handle different jobs.

With the patches now developed by researchers at MIT, this problem has been licked and users can easily swap modules to handle different functions.

To illustrate, the MIT researchers talk about a bag that can help people who are prone to forget things. They have made a bag equipped with a module containing a radio antenna and a receiver and programmed to listen for signals from radio frequency identification tags on objects such as cell phones or keys or anything else usually kept in a bag.

When the bag is picked up, a sensor module in the bag's handle detects the fact that it has been picked up and triggers a reader to run through a list of objects that the computer module has been programmed to check out. If an item on the list is not detected, it uses a voice synthesiser module in another patch to warn the user that he or she has forgotten the cell phone or the key.

The MIT researchers say that they plan to make to the system smarter by adding, for instance, a Bluetooth chip.

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