According to foreign media reports, Rice University researchers recently demonstrated a clothing with carbon nanotubes that can continuously monitor the wearer's heart. There's no need to wear an uncomfortable smartwatch or chest strap to monitor your heart if your comfortable clothing does a better job. That's the idea behind "smart clothing" developed by a Rice University lab that uses its conductive nanowires to weave functionality into regular clothing.
Matteo Pasquali, a chemical and biomolecular engineer at the school's Brown School of Engineering, reports in Nano Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society, that it sewn nanotube fibers into sportswear to monitor heart rate and perform continuous electrocardiographic monitoring of the wearer. .
Ifølge forskerne er fibrene like ledende som metalltråder, men er vaskbare, komfortable og mye mindre sannsynlige for å knekke når kroppen er i bevegelse. Totalt sett var de forbedrede plaggene deres bedre til å samle inn data enn standard bryststroppmonitorer som tok feltmålinger i eksperimentene. Når de ble matchet med kommersielle medisinske elektrodemonitorer, presterte karbonnanorørplaggene litt bedre på EKG.
"The garment had to fit snugly against the chest," said Rice graduate student Lauren Taylor, lead author of the study. "In future research, we will focus on using denser blocks of carbon nanowires so that there is more surface area to contact the skin."
Forskerne påpeker at nanorørfibrene er myke og elastiske, og klær som inneholder dem kan vaskes i maskin. Disse fibrene kan maskinsys på stoffet som standardtråd. Sikksakk-mønsteret gjør at stoffene kan strekke seg uten å knekke dem.
The fibers not only provide a stable electrical contact with the wearer's skin, Taylor said, but also act as electrodes to connect electronic devices such as Bluetooth transmitters, relay data to smartphones, or connect to Holter monitors that can fit in the user's pocket. device.
Pasquali's lab introduced carbon nanotube fibers in 2013. Since then, fibers containing tens of billions of nanotubes each have been studied to repair bridges in damaged hearts, as electrical interfaces to the brain, for cochlear implants, as flexible antennas, and for automotive and aerospace applications. Their development is also part of the Rice-based Carbon Center, a multi-university research initiative led by Rice and launched in 2019.
De originale nanorørfilamentene var omtrent 22 mikron brede, for tynne til at en symaskin kunne håndtere. En taumaker ble brukt til å lage den sybare tråden, i utgangspunktet tre bunter med syv filamenter hver, vevd til omtrent samme størrelse som vanlig tråd, sa Taylor.
"We worked with a guy who sold a little machine designed to make ropes for model boats," says Taylor, who initially tried to weave the thread by hand with limited success. "He was able to make us a mid-scale device that could do that."
Sikk-sakk-mønsteret kan justeres for å ta hensyn til hvor mye strekk et sportstøy eller annet stoff kan være, sa hun. Taylor sa at teamet jobber med Dr. Mehdi Razavi og hans kolleger ved Texas Heart Institute for å finne ut hvordan man maksimerer hudkontakt.
Fibrene som er vevd inn i stoffet kan også brukes til å bygge inn antenner eller lysdioder, sa forskerne. Små endringer i fibergeometrien og tilhørende elektronikk kan til slutt tillate klær å overvåke vitale tegn, innsats eller pustefrekvens.
Other potential uses could include human-machine interfaces in cars or soft robots, or as antennas, health monitors and bulletproof protection for military uniforms, Taylor noted. "We demonstrated with a collaborator a few years ago that carbon nanotube fibers dissipate energy better per unit weight than Kevlar fibers, and that's without some of our later progress in tensile strength," she said. "
"We're seeing this material play a role in more and more applications after 20 years of development in laboratories around the world," Pasquali said. "Carbon nanotubes are a natural building block for wearable devices due to their combination of electrical conductivity, good skin contact, biocompatibility and softness."
Selv om det bærbare markedet er relativt lite, kan det være et inngangspunkt for en ny generasjon bærekraftige materialer som kan utvinnes fra hydrokarboner gjennom direkte spaltning, en prosess som også produserer rent hydrogen, sa han. Utvikling av dette materialet er et fokus for Carbon Center.
"We are in the same situation as solar cells were decades ago," Pasquali said. "We need application leaders that can power scale-up of production and improve efficiency."
