It seems that the future is bright in terms of being in a clothe with a complete Electrical circuit system.

Just imagine your shorts, shirts, etc fully wired with an electrically conductive coating that collects sunlight to power our smartphones or continuously monitor our vital signs like a full-body Fitbit.

The innovation being talked about in this article is a stretchable, washable, non-metal coating that transforms any piece of clothing into a robust electrical conductor.

A team of scientists and engineers from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have invented an impossibly thin conductive coating that can be applied at room temperature to any textile or material — cotton, wool, silk, polyester, leather, or plastic — without altering the look and feel of the garment.

The garment is coated with a conductive polymer that measures only 500 nanometers thick (one-tenth the thickness of a human hair), the fabrics can act as their own simple circuits.

The researchers or maybe Scientists also used the same available materials to turn an inexpensive sports bra into a wearable heart rate monitor with eight strategically placed sensors versus Fitbit’s one.

Trisha Andrew runs the Wearable Electronics Lab at UMass Amherst where the conductive coating was developed.

She said that her research team were inspired by the reactive vapor deposition process used in the semiconductor industry to make the silicon chips in all of our devices.

But instead of using 500-degree ovens and caustic chemical reactants to lay down nanolayers of material, Trisha Andrew’s lab used a room-temperature vacuum tube pumped with more environmentally friendly compounds from organic chemistry.

They penned down the procedures in a recent issue of the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The result of the lab’s vapor deposition technique is highly conductive polymer called poly (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) — nickname PEDOT — that channels electricity as efficiently as the copper wiring in your house.

Andrew said that the flexible PEDOT coating overcomes the challenge of trying to design wearable circuitry for different types of materials with varying surface roughness and surface chemistries.

“Our method doesn’t care what you give us,” said Andrew, “whether it’s a sports bra from a big box store or a silk tulle dress from a very fancy boutique. If you want that transformed into something electronic, we can put a conductive coating on it.”

The sports bra heart monitor works when the thin circuitry on the bra touches the skin and registers the small changes in conductivity that accompany the sound waves generated by every heartbeat.

Andrew’s lab is getting the sports bra ready for the human testing stage and developing software that will analyze data from its eight sensors to produce a “smarter” picture of heart health.

Andrew’s lab has made other simple circuits that generate small amounts of heat and recently made a breakthrough on a separate method for actually generating electricity through your clothes.

The science is called the triboelectric effect. It happens whenever two materials rub against each other and create a surface charge, like rubbing your socks across a thick carpet.

Andrew and her team created a second polymer coating that acts as an insulator and wove together both insulating and conducting threads to make a triboelectric textile patch.

“As you tug or pat the material, it actually generates power,” said Andrew. “With all of your small body motions — bending, stretching, walking, twisting an arm — you’ll actually be generating power.”

Right now, the electricity is measured in microwatts, enough to run a Fitbit, but the long-term goal is to create a self-charging fabric that could one day power your smartphone.

Info source;http://www.premiumstech.com/2017/07/Innovation-This-Sports-Bra-Checks-Your-Heart-Rate-and-Recharges-as-You-Move.html?m=1