MIT researchers have created the first fabric-fiber to have digital capabilities, ready to collect, store and analyze data using a neural network. Cre

MIT Engineers Create a Programmable Digital Fiber – With Memory, Sensors, and AI

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2021-06-04 18:30:08

MIT researchers have created the first fabric-fiber to have digital capabilities, ready to collect, store and analyze data using a neural network. Credit: Anna Gittelson. Photo by Roni Cnaani

In a first, the digital fiber contains memory, temperature sensors, and a trained neural network program for inferring physical activity.

MIT researchers have created the first fiber with digital capabilities, able to sense, store, analyze, and infer activity after being sewn into a shirt.

Yoel Fink, who is a professor of material sciences and electrical engineering, a Research Laboratory of Electronics principal investigator, and the senior author on the study, says digital fibers expand the possibilities for fabrics to uncover the context of hidden patterns in the human body that could be used for physical performance monitoring, medical inference, and early disease detection.

Fink and his colleagues describe the features of the digital fiber today (June 3, 2021) in Nature Communications. Until now, electronic fibers have been analog — carrying a continuous electrical signal — rather than digital, where discrete bits of information can be encoded and processed in 0s and 1s.

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