Ep. 83: Acoustic fabric supports health monitoring and space exploration Podcast

This transcription has been AI generated and therefore may have some inaccuracies.

Ep. 83: Acoustic fabric supports health monitoring and space exploration

In this episode of The WTiN Podcast, we talk to Yoel Fink, Professor of Materials Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Speaker 1: WTiN
Speaker 2: Yoel Fink

Speaker 1
Hello, my name is Jessica Owen, and I'm part of the team here at WTI n. And this is the WTI mn podcast. Join me, my colleagues and our guests every month, as we talk about new and interesting innovations from across the textile and apparel industry. Whether it's talking to sustainable startups quizzing experts on the latest research and development, or chatting to companies about their most recent products, you can rest assured that the WTiN podcast will connect you with everything you need to know. In this episode, we talk to Yoel Fink, who is a professor of material science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, otherwise known as MIT, Yoel talks about his team's new fabric that he is the wide ranging applications from detecting space dust to monitoring unborn babies, and about his new course that combines computing with textiles called competing fabrics.

Speaker 1
Hello, and welcome to the WTIiN podcast, how are you doing?

Speaker 2
I'm doing awesome, beautiful day.

Speaker 1
Good. And yes, I mean, I think we last spoke at it mar Barcelona a few years ago. So I mean, how was the last couple of years been treating you?

Speaker 2
Well, the world is turned upside down. And I don't think it was done with that yet. I think with all this mayhem going on, it is still well, I would say it's a great pleasure to continue to make progress here on these beautiful things called fabrics. And so I'm really happy and excited to talk about progress. But also noting that you know, the world is falling apart at the seams. Yeah,

Speaker 1
yeah. But you know what, I think people want to hear about something other than COVID or war. So, you know, let's give people something to be tried by? Yes. Well, I mean, as I said, Thank you for joining me. And as ever, MIT has been up to some very cool things lately. And the one I wanted to start picking your brain about today is a fabric that's been inspired by the human ear. So I mean, I'll let you explain a bit more about it. But for everyone listening, essentially, it's a fabric that can convert sound into the electrical signals similarly to how your ear does that naturally. So first question, Why have you decided to do this? I mean, what inspired this particular piece of research?

Speaker 2
Yeah, well, thank you for that introduction. You know, we've been trying to give fabrics a greater meaning, I mean, fabrics have always played an important role in people's lives. Over the past almost two decades, we've been trying to see how far can we take fabric? And how far can we take actually a fibre as part of that? Our belief is that the next implementation of, of computation of technology is going to be within a fabric. And so I'm happy to talk a little bit about that. But that really provides us with the context for the work we're doing to the research work. It's really figuring out what it's going to take and how it's going to take to really get computers to really be look like and feel like fabrics. And so part of what you need in a computer is a microphone. So that's one way to look at it. Another dimension, I think, to your to your excellent question, really has to do with the fact that fabrics are really present in our lives from the very beginning till till till the end, and in a way capture the soundtrack of our lives. Every conversation we have every important interaction. Every sound, every bird we hear is, is actually captured in our fabrics. And I'm not only talking about sounds that are coming from outside of our body, I'm talking about heartbeats. I'm talking about every time we breathe, I'm talking about every time we move every time we walk. All of this acoustic information is present and absorbed in our fabric up till now fabrics have turned that soundtrack into heat, essentially erased it. Wouldn't it be amazing to give us access to that soundtrack? That is another motivator for this work. Finally, and this is maybe some of the things that I've learned about recently. You know, when we're talking now, our vocal cords are generating sound. In fact, they're generating very small pressure waves that are minuscule, they're like, less than a millionth of an atmosphere. So they're really, really, really small. Our ears are capable of detecting that and converting that to meaningful signal in terms of our brains. And, you know, what we were fascinated by is whether we could really create that kind of fabric ear. And while I'm happy to kind of talk a little bit more about that, but the IRS just is a fascinating Oregon actually as sensitive as the eye. And so, could you actually do that in a fabric?

Speaker 1
Yeah, that's so interesting, actually. I mean, you're thinking outside the box there? For sure. The fabric? Yes, yeah, there you go. That's better. So this fabric, then, can you tell me a bit about how it's made? And like, what components are inside it? Yeah, that'd be useful. Yeah.

Speaker 2
You know, being a scientist, I start with a few observations, of observations of things that are not so easy to observe. So as we're having this conversation, turns out, there are waves that are generating generated in our fabrics, just like the waves in the ocean. So we're having this conversation, people are listening to your podcast, they don't realise or see, but their fabrics are vibrating and their waves travelling through their fabrics. Okay, so that was one. One thing to to note. Now, the reason we don't feel or see these waves, they're, they're microscopic, they're, you know, well will will will smaller than the width of a hair. So we don't really get to feel or see these. But they exist. This work was around capturing those waves, demonstrating that they exist, demonstrating that they don't disappear very quickly, and tried to capture their motion and translate that motion into a detectable electrical signal. So it is those waves in a fabric that got us to really think about the properties of this of the fibre and how to how to detect waves in a in a in a fabric. I will also note, and I think this is no surprise to your listeners is Fabric is a solid. That's right. It's a solid material. But it does have some properties of the fluid that we do speak of fabric flow. And so the connection between fabrics and fluids, fabrics and waves shouldn't come as a great surprise to the listeners. And so yeah, that's kind of where what got us started here. 

Speaker 1
So then the fabric you've made, how have you managed to make it? Listen, I mean, what was in this fabric that enables it to do that?

Speaker 2
Yeah, so we're so we start with these weights. And next time you're in notion or near the ocean, you'll notice that there are two types of things that you see on the water. One is sort of the log type of thing, which is a piece of wood that just goes up and down with the waves. The other type of object is sometimes seen ocean is the seaweed, which bends and conforms with the waves, we set out to develop a fibre that is more like seaweed, it bends with the waves of the fabric. So that was one property and therefore the fibre like the seaweed had to be very flexible, and move with the waves not opposed. Number one. Number two is we wanted a fibre that could report that it's actually bending with the weights. And so these two requirements, the first of flexibility and the second of reporting electrical on the existence of the waves and the bending with the waves defined the materials that we chose to make the fibre and I'm going to hold it this output so you could see it but that's that's sort of what makes this this fibre what it is,

Speaker 1
right? That's cool. So does it have anything inside it that is able to report back and we How does that work?

Speaker 2
So we just talked about two properties. One is flexibility and the other one is electrical reporting. Now let's focus on the materials and the composition of the fibre. So the fibre has, I would say two important components to it. One is a cladding which is made of a rubbery like material, so a material that is very flexible. So that's Component number one and most of the fibre is made of highly flexible miniature, internal to that flexible material. is a small layer, which we is made up of a piezo electric material, that small layer has been above and below it two electrodes. And so when that piezo electric that layer bends, it generates a small voltage and those electrodes that basically run through the entire length of the fibre communicate the existence of that potential that that voltage to the end of the fibre which is where we sit. And so when the fibre as a result of its flexibility bends, there's a small little voltage that travels down the fibre and gets detected. And that's essentially how the fibre works, I will mention that the fibre on its own is fairly deaf. And the fabric we put it, it is completely deaf. So, one of the amazing things in life is seeing, you know, a combination of two things and each one on their own doesn't work. But when you put them together gives you an outcome is exactly what happened. Here, we took two materials, two structures, which on their own cannot detect sound, but when putting them together become a very sensitive microphone.

Speaker 1
So the batteries involved or anything like that, I mean, I'm just trying to picture someone wearing a shirt and it actually listening and how it's turned on. Yeah.

Speaker 2
So this gives me an opportunity to talk a little bit about the future. And the future that we see is not one in which only the fibres are doing specific things and reporting them out. But the fibres are a, take that information, store it, process it and also give you the insights that are derived from that processing. So where we're heading is taking those signals coming from the fibre, storing them in the fibre, applying algorithms in the fibre, making inferences in fibre. There was last year we published a paper on the first digital fibre. Yeah, so that actually showed how you can take information store it and not only that, but also have a programme stored in the fibre itself. I mentioning this because I think it's important for the listeners to put together a mental picture around what's going up. And what's going on what's going on is not that there's a one trick pony here or, or a just the listening of fibre that could do this thing or that thing. But it's all fitting in to a a vision that really implements or realises the entire world that we see today and in our smartphones, or wherever we want to call it in a in a fabric and the fibre is part of it. And so yes, you need to store the information, yes, you need to process it, you need to convert it to a digital signal, you need to apply digital signal processing to it. Some of these operations require power. We want to report out ultimately what what the meaning of all this is. So that also requires communications also require power. So all of these things are part of the system. Right now we're in an intermediate stage where we have to sit outside of the fibre and recorded on a circuit. And those circuits can be quite small. But they're still external to the fibre at this point.

Speaker 1
Going back to the fabric and it being able to hear then I wanted to ask a bit more about the sensitivity of it. I mean, you said earlier, it could sense I don't know your heart rate and things like that. So yeah, if you don't mind telling me a bit more, how well it works. So

Speaker 2
first of all, sound waves generating in just conversations or audible sounds, things we pick up with our ears when when humans just interact are very small. They're, you know, a 10th of a millionth of an atmosphere. So, if you put your head in a pool, you already have much higher pressures on your ear than when you just have a conversation. So detecting audible sound is is, is pretty impressive in itself. And I think that, you know, when we could pick up whispers, certainly louder sounds than that. So that's, I think, one one point I wanted to make about sensitivity. And also to mention that in a way, the pounding of the heart or the breaths that you take, generate much larger sound than a lot of time voice does. And so the amount of displacement or or the ability to pick up the sounds from the heart, in some ways is easier than doing voice. So, yep, the answer is there's a whole range of sounds that these fabrics are capable of on, you know, detecting. And it goes all the way from a whisper to certainly very loud things, both external but also internal to the body.

Speaker 1
Interesting, okay. Now because it can do all these things, when I first read about this on the MIT website, there were a few applications that really intrigued me. And I wanted to ask you a bit more about like how they would actually work in practice. So one of them was like, maternity wear for listening to a baby's feet. I mean, yeah, how would that work?

Speaker 2
So I think one one point I just wanted to mention here, and kind of going back to this, learning from the air, it turns out, we don't have a single ear, we have to. And one of the questions that people wonder about is why do we actually have two ears? Why do we have two eyes? We have just one nose one pilot, but you know, why do you have two ears. And at least one reason is that having one ear allows you to take sound, but two years allow you to detect the direction of sound. And way back when, but even now, identifying the direction of sound turns out to be super important. Our ability to cue into particular speakers in a very noisy or particular sounds very noisy environment really depends on having two ears. And so, you know, in fabrics, having multiple fibres is quite natural. And so part of what we're thinking about here is not just detecting sound, but detecting the direction of sound. Okay, now, let's talk now about the unborn. And I obviously have never been pregnant, but there are today, quite a few pregnancies which are considered at risk. And what I've heard is that when an expecting mom is at risk, pregnancy is at risk. She is asked by the doctor to monitor the movements of the unborn of her baby. Okay. Now, how do you monitor movements when you're asleep? How do you do that? But you're still worried and the doctor told you to monitor these movements, but you're sleeping. And so what do you do? You probably are half awake the whole time. Okay? Now, wouldn't it be great if we could just have a garment that sits on pregnant woman that could actually pick up the foetal heart beat? Turns out, you know, the unborn are communicating, they are not communicating through voice but they're actually are communicating through sound. And their movement generate sound, their heart generate sound, and and when they are distressed, the sound of their hearts change. And so having a fabric like this, that could sit on a on a woman, and could actually tell her what's going on, certainly alert her to a situation of distress. That could work during the day. But importantly, also during the night, that, you know, at the very least, could contribute to this peace of mind. And, you know, we were just talking about these crazy times. And so having something that actually contributes to being able to sleep better, to peace of mind for 50% of our population. You know, that's, that's, that's, that's an awesome goal. Yeah,

Speaker 1
no, that really is awesome. And another application I read about with, seems miles different. Again, really, like I thought it was really cool was you can listen to space dust. Why is that necessary? Why would you want to do that?

Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, we're, you know, we haven't published all that work. So I'll sort of probably say just a little bit about it. But one of the students that I'm working with Giuliana Churston, from the Media Lab, but has a real passion for for space and for science. And, you know, we've been telescopes, you know, we're observing space and distant objects. And essentially, you're taking electromagnetic waves of light and giving us information about, you know, about, about the universe. Well, there's another type of object that's flying through space that is could give us a lot of information about the universe, which is called space dust. Now, could you create the space dust telescope, the telescope that actually collects the dust and analyses it and gives you information about where it's coming from and what it's like and its impact and so on. This is where fabrics could play a role and she's figured out a way to we just talked about, there's no sound Going through space, but there are highly energetic particles that when they hit a fabric can generate waves. And we just talked about detecting waves in fabric. So you just put these things together. She's not only thought of this idea, not only implemented, but as she's already launched the version of it to the International Space Station, so and already got a piece of the back. So this is like, well on its way. You know, I think she's going to report on our results, probably in the not too distant future. But I think that's one very exciting application.

Speaker 1
Yeah, definitely. I'll have to keep an eye out for that and read it. Because yeah, I thought that was very cool. Okay. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 2
yeah, I think there's another another thing that you may have noticed, but maybe not. So, you know, half of the population 50% of the population or so could experience a pregnancy. But 100% of the population is going to experience challenges in hearing. It is just a matter of time before our hearing ability declines to a point that requires intervention, all of us are going to be challenged in hearing eventually. So that's 100% of the population. Now, you'd say, well, that seems to be a solved problem, we just put, we just use hearing aid. Well, if you talk to somebody that has an hearing aid, you'd run one thing, it works great in one on one conversations in a quiet environment. But if you're in a noisy environment, it actually completely overwhelms you with noise, it actually doesn't. Now imagine this, those folks that have hearing challenges are actually precluded, in some ways from attending events that have a lot of people, it and precisely those events that would help them that would help support them, that would help them make feel good, feel better, those family events, those ceremonies, those board meetings off of those are the ones that they can't go to, because they can't hear. So one of the things that we're doing now, and I mentioned, you know, having two ears and having multiple fibres, as giving you the ability to listen to cue in particular directions, is we're envisioning a system in which your hearing aid is given highly directional capabilities by tying into these acoustic fabrics. And so you'll be able to focus on listening to a particular person, while allowing all the rest to be quiet. And that's one of the exciting things for me is is providing solutions for people that are, you know, that are challenged in their in their hearing.

Speaker 1
Yeah, definitely. I mean, my grandpa, he would definitely benefit from this right now. But he's probably listen, your grandpa,

Speaker 2
and my mom and myself and all of us, actually, eventually. So you know, I have a close friend, very close friend that, you know, is really not going to events, not going to board meetings, not going to a lot of those things he's is it has sound as lucid as, as on top of things as ever. But when he's in events, which involve cell noise, his hearing aids just overwhelmed. So we shy away from it. And that's, you know, that's, that's terrible. And so, here's the, I think, a really interesting solution that would allow us to listen to particular directions. And, in fact, I mean, in many ways a fabric can't match, you know, our own natural hearing, you know, the sensitivity of our ears, but directionally speaking of fabric can do better than the ears, we could we show on this paper and ability to discern the direction of a clap to within a single degree. You can do that with your eyes closed. And so in some ways, the fabric is already delivering capabilities that your ears can't, we could listen to infrasound we could listen to ranges of sound that can't be picked up by the air. Maybe ultrasound. So, you know, I think in some ways, in many ways, we're never going to be as good as they are, but in some ways we could be better.

Speaker 1
Yeah, that's quite remarkable really. Now, I mean, we've spoken about all these amazing things that you can do with this fabric, but I mean, come on commercialise a product and actually make it feasible and you know, comfortable to wear if you say this pregnant lady at night, she wants to be as comfy as possible. I mean, is it comfortable? I mean, what's what's it feel like? 

Speaker 2
Yeah, so the fact of the matter is, I think that answer your question goes to how much of a fibre do you need in order to enable a fabric to pick ups out? And their answer is very little, it's enough for you to have a 10 centimetre piece in your fabric for the fabric to pick up so and so. And this 10 centimetre piece is a highly flexible fibre. So, you know, our view of this question is that, because of that you need so little and, and because of the fact that it fits into a fabric so well, you really are not perturbing changing the qualities of the fabric that we all appreciate. Comfort in, and also aesthetics, which I think are are also, you know, are also super important. So maybe one thing to mention here, and maybe it's it's obvious, but there are three layers, I kind of think about in terms of motivation here, one motivation is the fibres getting a fibres into into a fabric will and getting a computer to be realised into a into a fabric is going to be very convenient, you're not going to need to walk around with something hard in your pocket or in your pocketbook. Okay, so convenience is sort of the very basic level, we just want to leave our homes with our clothes. Okay, that's that's sort of like, so the convenience is one level. The second level is beauty and aesthetics. Okay. The we are right now in a situation where you need to choose between either technology or aesthetics. If you're going into aesthetics, what you're going to be doing fashion, you're going to be doing fabrics, if you're doing any technology, you're going to be doing boxes, with glass, and metal on them, or some glasses on or something like that that sits on on your body. So the second element here is bringing technology and aesthetics to actually go together. Okay, that's sort of the second level the beauty of technology, you wouldn't look at a microphone twice. Okay, a microphone, is, there's no one in the world today that will tell you that a microphone is an object of beauty. If you were to see one of these acoustic fabrics, I mean, they could be as beautiful as any fabric. Okay, so beauty, I think is the aesthetics of technology, the beauty of technology. And number three is health, sitting on your wrist, and monitoring the electrical activity of your heart could give you significant insights. In some ways, it's like sitting in a control centre and monitoring the traffic lights of the city. monitoring traffic lights is important. But it actually doesn't tell you anything about the traffic. If you think about it, traffic lights, yeah, if they go wrong, you're going to have a problem. But if they're working, does that mean that there is traffic where there is it actually doesn't tell you. And in the same way, when you monitor the electrical activity, the heart, you're monitoring the traffic, like you're monitoring the control system, but you're actually not monitoring the heart itself. And so being able to listen to the heart, is what a fabric does. And it's no wrist band is going to give you that. So I think that's important that that level, that layer, which started with those, those different layers of the system would start with or motivation, the different layers of motivation, start with convenience, go through beauty and end with health. sort of give you the motivation for this one.

Speaker 1
Another question aside from like, comfort and how it looks and things like that. I mean, is it actually cost effective to produce a scalable, cost the earth if you want to?

Speaker 2
Yeah, exactly, exactly. What you know, I mean, we've talked about this in the past, but the way we make these fibres is we start off with making a large object, which is just a scaled up version of the fibre. Making large objects turn out to be relatively simple, you could do it in a machine shop. Making small objects is usually very difficult. And that's where the billions of dollars go into a single fab. Now, wouldn't it be great if you could imagine something in a large size and then somehow get it to magically make into a small size? There's very few things that are made that way. One of the things that I hear about is there's candies that are sort of made in large thing then they draw them out and make small cat but those are made out of sugar, probably not as good for you. Now, these fibres are made in a very similar way we make them large, and then heat them up, cause them to flow and then turn into a fibre. And so they start in a large scale object, solid object that has all of the structure and all of the materials that we need to have in the final fibre. We put it we feed it into a furnace and pour on it and outcomes of very, very long fibre. And so when we address the question of cost, you inevitably have to think about how things are made? And how skilled are they. And I'm really telling you, we have like hundreds of metres of this stuff, just coming out of our research pod here. And you know that that, that to me, bodes very well for the future. And I think the cost of the thing, especially when you're talking about a few centimetres, as being sufficient, is going to make it very accessible. Okay,

Speaker 1
right. Now, I'm just aware of the time but there are a couple other questions I wanted to ask you before you go. And basically the last? Well, since forever, really, MIT has been doing some really cool things. So just to list a few things I've seen in like the last 612 months, you've got a waivable, fibre battery, someone's making like an interactive carpet. I don't think it will necessarily you but at least come out of MIT material science. So I mean, what else is on the agenda? What other ideas or that you've got in the pipeline?

Speaker 2
Yeah, well, I think the important thing is that there's tremendous opportunities in fabrics. I think that that's one thing that is occurring to more and more people is that fabrics are. There's a there it is very expressive and very powerful, expressive language, when it comes to creativity in technology. It's always been expression, language, in terms of aesthetics in terms of comfort, but now it's becoming an expressive language in terms of technology. And so I think if people realise that a fabric in the very near future is going to have all the attributes that you come to expect from phones, computers from all those stuff, but it's actually you know, look like feel like, like a fabric. Computing fabrics is what we're, you know, what we're, what we're after, and what we think is going to happen. And in fact, we're already teaching a course called computing fabrics. So in that respect, I think the future is very much now.

Speaker 1
Well, that nicely leads me on to the last question I had for you is you are teaching now. So I mean, tell me about this course you've got going, what what are you teach your students about?

Speaker 2
Yes, yes, we have had a very close collaboration with a design school with Rhode Island School of Design, and specifically with their textile department, and more specifically with a professor there called sname is on ice sokkia was the department head. And so years ago, we started working together, bringing together students that really see fabrics and fashion and textiles as means of expressive expression. And bringing them together with technologists, engineers, computer scientists, people like that from MIT. So we started doing that, but really, we realised that the place to really make progress is with students. And so putting together a curriculum where students right from the get go, learn how to, on the one hand programme computer board and learn how to make functional fibres, but also learn how to weave and knit and and make, you know, and spinning yarns. And putting those two skill sets together to create a unified expressive language is what this course is about. And, you know, it's just been a real pleasure. I mean, this term, this spring term has been the first time it is an official course catalogue in at MIT and material science, but the students are from all over MIT and also some from from other institutions. And I think one of the things that are just also very exciting to me is, I have right now in class 26 students, 24 of them are females. And so, it's it what it what it shows me is that we're onto a direction that I think is going to have have in it as much gender expression as we've ever had. And so this, it's actually very, very exciting to me.

Speaker 1
Since I've been doing this podcast or just writing articles, people have always said to me, we've got to somehow bridge this gap between design and technology. And now you've got a course that is doing that in one. So yeah, I think that's brilliant

Speaker 2
on a very actually in a very basic level. You know, it's it's not, you know, the high level ideas have always been around the high level ideas have always been around, but could you actually teach, you know, a, you know, a textile designer, how to programme a board and how to make a fibre? And could you teach the ones that are doing that know how to programme how to actually knit? So those skill sets are coming together, and students are participating and in groups and some are good at one thing, but not as good as other. So there's really a lot of cross cross fertilisation and yeah, it's just, it's just been a great pleasure.

Speaker 1
Ya know, I can imagine. Wow, unfortunately, that's all we've got time for today. But I mean, thank you so much for sort of coming on the podcast. It's been great to catch up with you and find out about all these applications and smart textiles and that so yeah, thank you very much Yoel.

Speaker 2
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Jess. And thank you for helping bringing this exciting message to so many people.