MIT scientists create a cloth that can hear and emit noise

[bamalli]

Tech and Science

Home > Breaking News > Tech and Science > Story

Jul 13, 2010

Cloth that can listen
NEW YORK - THIS could give a whole new meaning to the phrase power dressing. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a cloth that can hear and emit noise.

The team, led by MIT professor Yoel Fink, has reached 'a new milestone on the path to functional fibres: fibres that can detect and produce sound,' MIT said in a statement.

The development, described in the August issue of Nature Materials, transforms the usual passive nature of textiles into a virtually all-singing, all-dancing version. According to MIT, 'applications could include clothes that are themselves sensitive microphones, for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions, and tiny filaments that could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain.'

The decade-old research project aims to 'develop fibres with ever more sophisticated properties, to enable fabrics that can interact with their environment, ' MIT said. The new space-age cloth, it said, can not only listen, but make sound.

'You can actually hear them, these fibres,' Noemie Chocat, part of the lab team, said. 'If you connected them to a power supply and applied a sinusoidal current, then it would vibrate. And if you make it vibrate at audible frequencies and put it close to your ear, you could actually hear different notes or sounds coming out of it.'

The new fibres are based on a similar plastic to that used in microphones. However, researchers manipulated the fluorine content to ensure its molecules stayed lopsided. That imbalance makes the plastic piezoelectric, meaning it changes shape when an electric field is applied.

'In addition to wearable microphones and biological sensors, applications of the fibres could include loose nets that monitor the flow of water in the ocean and large-area sonar imaging systems with much higher resolutions, ' MIT said. 'A fabric woven from acoustic fibres would provide the equivalent of millions of tiny acoustic sensors.' -- AFP