Fibers That Can Hear and Sing
From: MIT News - 07/12/2010
By: Larry Hardesty

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers are developing fibers
with highly sophisticated properties that could enable fabrics to interact
with their environment. MIT professor Yoel Fink has led the development of
fibers that can detect and produce sound, with applications that could
include clothes that function as 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 key to the new acoustic
fibers is a plastic commonly used in microphones. In addition to wearable
microphones and biological sensors, the fibers could be used to make loose
nets that monitor the flow of water in the ocean and large-area sonar imaging
systems. Eventually, the researchers hope to combine the properties of the
experimental fibers in a single fiber. The fibers also could take advantage
of piezoelectric properties to generate their own power. "Imagine a thread
that can generate electric when stretched," says MIT research scientist Zheng
Wang. 

Read the entire article at:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/acoustic-fibers-0712.html

Links:
Multimaterial piezoelectric fibers
http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmat2792.html

Yoel Fink
http://www.rle.mit.edu/rleonline/people/YoelFink.html

Smart Fibers Could Bring Smarter Clothes (Podcast)
http://mdtmag.com/Multimedia/Podcasts/2010/07/podcasts-all-smart-fibers-could-bring-smarter-clothes/