World’s first touchscreen woven into clothing using electronic fibers

From the report

A washable, flexible garment integrates thousands of microchips into touch-sensitive fibers, creating a wearable screen that displays videos, responds to touch, and connects wirelessly to devices. (Nanowerk News) Researchers at the National University of Singapore’s College of Design and Engineering (CDE) have developed a fiber that functions as pixels and senses touch at the same time, integrating 54 of them into a sleeve to create the world’s first touchscreen built into a garment.

The sleeve displays images and video, responds to finger presses and connects wirelessly to other devices, yet stays as washable, breathable and flexible as ordinary clothing. The team’s invention enables garments to act as a direct interface to a wearer’s health data and digital devices, with no rigid screen involved. The screens that we are familiar with, such as those on phones and laptops, typically present graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on flat, rigid panels that display information and enable interaction. Textiles, woven from one-dimensional fibers, have never matched this capability. A full-color, touch-sensitive display that can be threaded like yarn was, until now, out of reach.

“What made this possible was our ability to construct the GUI system from electronic building blocks in fibre form — similar to traditional yarn, but with the sophisticated electronic functionality built directly into the fibres,” said Asst Prof Khudiyev. The team, led by Assistant Professor Tural Khudiyev from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at CDE, published their findings in (Nature, “Touch-sensing digital pixel fibre enables interactive garment GUI”).