Ep. 83: Acoustic fabric supports health monitoring and space exploration
-By Jessica Owen
In this episode of The WTiN Podcast, we talk to Yoel Fink, Professor of Materials Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
MIT is well-known for its research concerning textiles & apparel, and most recently Fink and his team have developed a ‘fabric that hears’. The fabric works like a microphone, converting sound into mechanical vibrations, then into electrical signals, similarly to how our ears hear.
In this podcast, Fink talks about the inspiration for the research and how the aim is to start ‘capturing the soundtrack of our lives’. He talks about how the team have made the fibre and resulting fabric, how it’s cost-effective to produce and the cool applications that range from monitoring unborn babies to detecting space dust.
The fabric listens just like human ears. Image credit: Greg Hren
Elsewhere, he speaks of the ‘tremendous opportunities with fabrics’ and highlights a new course at MIT that combines computing with textiles called Computing Fabrics.
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