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This designer clothing lets users turn on electronics while turning away bacteria

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Geekz Snow
This designer clothing lets users turn on electronics while turning away bacteria

- A new addition to your wardrobe may soon help you turn on the lights and music - while also keeping you fresh, dry, fashionable, clean and safe from the latest virus that's going around.

Purdue University researchers have developed a new fabric innovation that allows wearers to control electronic devices through clothing.

"It is the first time there is a technique capable to transform any existing cloth item or textile into a self-powered e-textile containing sensors, music players or simple illumination displays using simple embroidery without the need for expensive fabrication processes requiring complex steps or expensive equipment," said Ramses Martinez, an assistant professor in the School of Industrial Engineering and in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering in Purdue's College of Engineering.

"For the first time, it is possible to fabricate textiles that can protect you from rain, stains, and bacteria while they harvest the energy of the user to power textile-based electronics," Martinez said.

"These self-powered e-textiles also constitute an important advancement in the development of wearable machine-human interfaces, which now can be washed many times in a conventional washing machine without apparent degradation.

Martinez said the Purdue waterproof, breathable and antibacterial self-powered clothing is based on omniphobic triboelectric nanogeneragtors (RF-TENGs) - which use simple embroidery and fluorinated molecules to embed small electronic components and turn a piece of clothing into a mechanism for powering devices.

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