Powering smart fabrics

It has been a field of research that has been gathering pace for a number of years, but as the demand for wearable tech becomes even greater, smart clothing appears to be where the future is headed.

Wearable technology, like activity trackers and smart watches, is fast becoming a staple part of everyday outfits. Monitoring our own health and movement is now possible at the touch of a screen.

Actually embedding the technology into the material itself, known as smart fabrics or e-textiles, is the next step and this has been a leading research area at Southampton for many years.

Developing ways for a circuit to be powered through energy harvesting – capturing energy through external sources like kinetic or solar and then storing it to power devices – has been a key focus. Our scientists are even developing ways for us to power the devices we wear ourselves through every-day movements, and are also working to introduce wearable technology in the healthcare sector.

Leading this research within Electronics and Computer Science is Professor Steve Beeby.

He explains: “Sensors, for example in an activity tracker like a Fitbit, are all very small. We are trying to develop to a format where we can package it into a textile.

“We are taking the same electronics that are in the tracker and putting them into a long thin flexible circuit. We are trying to minimise size by using bare silicon chips and mounting these directly onto the plastic circuit to make them as small as possible.”