A Fabric That Can Detect Human Blood!
Nov 19, 2008 1654 hrs IST
Monitor your heart, measure the chemical composition of your body fluids, or keep track of your local environment with clothes
That's correct... if you thought Amitabh's amazing "bulb laden" costume in Yaarana was a technological wonder, you've heard nothing. The concept of "intelligent" fabrics is an old wives tale now. This field has had several advances in the not too recent past with attempts by many to introduce smartwear into the mainstream market with features like auto-temperature regulation, wearable keyboards, and even fiberoptic clothing, an advanced version of the Yaarana gimmick, where you actually light up the room you enter!
Most of these techniques were based on the "old" way of integrating sensors, wires, and circuits into a normal fabric. This is the bane of such "wearable computers," and resulted in their easy damage and their heavy maintenance. There is also loss of comfort, an all important factor, owing to the added weight and inflexibility.
With a lesson well learnt, scientists concentrated more on the comfort and unobtrusiveness of the fabric, and worked on developing the technology. They redesigned the fabric and integrated sensors within the material, instead of retrofitting the fabric with sensors after manufacture.
Enter carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes have seen global acceptance in various new-age technological applications. Be it their use in super glue of the future or their part in developing DRAM-like memory, they are the next big thing! In the quest for a perfect smart fabric, scientists stumbled upon this new technology, and it seems to be just what they have been looking for all these years!
The technology was conceptualized by Nocholas Kotov, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan. His goal was to home in on an alternative to the existing complex electronic textiles. He chose carbon nanotubes for this project, and the results were amazing! While there have been attempts in the past to integrate this technology with fabrics, these have met with little success.
Kotov and his team dipped a normal cotton fabric into a mixture of carbon nanotubes and a "conducive polymer," which gave the fabric the ability to carry a larger amount of electricity than previous versions of carbon nanotube-based fabrics. Kotov also displayed how an LED shone brightly when it was put into a circuit between two coated threads.
Kotov and team did not stop there. Being aware of the biosensing abilities of carbon nanotubes, thanks to their use in chemical sensing in clinical diagnostics, they decided to integrate these functionalities into the fabric as well. Kotov coated the fabric with the binding molecules of albumin, a human blood protein. When a target molecule comes into contact with the antibodies, they change the conductivity of the nanotube such that the change is detectable. The result? The carbon nanotube-integrated fabric could detect human blood! Additionally, this wearable diagnostic kit was sensitive enough to differentiate between bovine and human albumin. "Despite the simplicity of the concept, the sensitivity is amazing," says Kotov.
In future, you might have clothes that could monitor your heart, measure the chemical composition of your body fluids, or keep track of your local environment! This development promises to revolutionize healthcare and emergency response services. While a wearable diagnostic kit does not sound very interesting, it could be of vital importance in specific situations like war zones, where remote teams could be alerted if a soldier is injured and starts bleeding. Future systems could warn users of allergic substances in the air, if they are close to such a source. The possibilities are endless.
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