This Fiber Can Turn Your Clothes Into Listening Devices
Imagine if you could wear an ear. That probably sounds like the plot of a god-awful sci-fi screenplay from the 70s. But bear with us—it’s actually the future of fabric, and could very well play a new role in some critical medical applications.
In a new study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers from around the U.S. created a fiber that can bend under the slightest sounds. When woven into a shirt, the fibers were able to pick up the direction a sound was coming from—even ones as faint as a living person’s heartbeats.
“The project looks very exciting,” Swarun Kumar, an electrical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University who was not part of the study, told The Daily Beast in an email. “The health implications of this work, such as sensing heartbeats and heart rhythms sound very [promising].”
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