Like I once said in one of my previous articles, the future has come. Now, another amazing futuristic technology is emerging: a no-battery, wireless, tech-infused fabric health monitoring system that can monitor blood pressure in real time. Researchers at the National University of Singapore, the University of Arizona, and Tsinghua University have just created this technology.
Unlike many wearable devices like smartwatches and smart rings that use small, internal rechargeable batteries to function in tracking health metrics like sleep, heart rate, and activity, this new textile system gets power wirelessly from your smartphone, potentially turning everyday clothing into an always-on health tracker.
Tapping power wirelessly makes the wearable system more unique because it has eliminated one of the substantial challenges and limitations of wearables, which is the need to recharge often. As introduced in a recent Nature Electronics paper which was reported by Tech Xplore, the wearable system is built with epidermal sensors, ultra-thin and flexible sensors that stick to the skin and can pick up specific physiological signals.
It’s built into wearable fabric
The smart wearable system's epidermal sensors are connected by a special “metamaterial” textile woven into clothing, making it essentially embedded in what you wear. A metamaterial is an artificially engineered fabric material designed to have unique properties that wirelessly transfer power from nearby smartphones to the sensors. That is to say, your phone acts as the brain and power source for this smart fabric.
Your phone sends energy to the sensors wirelessly, and at the same time, it collects and processes the health data. So instead of constantly recharging the gadgets, your phone does the heavy lifting. The key innovation here is that it separates power and data signals. So, the smart fabric is set up in the sense that two different frequency channels are used: one for power transfer and the other frequency channel for data communication.
"The system uses a dual-mode metamaterial fabric to split power delivery (13.56 MHz) and data transmission (2.4 GHz) into separate channels", wrote the authors who introduced the research on Nature. Using two separate frequency channels is for the purpose of avoiding interference and keeping the signal more stable.
It can track blood pressure in real time
The smart wearable fabric can continuously monitor systolic blood pressure in real time even during workouts. Systolic blood pressure is the top (first) number in a blood pressure reading, measuring the maximum pressure in your arteries when your heart muscle contracts and pumps blood. Other smart wearable devices track blood pressure occasionally, not continually. Many of the devices couldn't track BP continually because many of their sensors struggle when the body is moving.
But this smart wearable fabric measures continuously, giving a much clearer picture of heart health. During the early tests, the smart fabric was able to monitor and track these readings accurately in dynamic environments even as users were exercising. This level of consistency makes it useful for long-term health monitoring and the early detection of heart-related issues such as heart attack, stroke, or exercise that elevates heart rate.
The researchers could achieve this wearable technology because of the metamaterial textile that mounts directly on the skin, giving no chance for movement. So, the connected textile layer's sensors allow data to be gathered continuously from different parts of the body into a unified network, which your smartphone will receive to give real-time monitoring of vital health signals such as blood pressure and other physiological data.
Notably, this is not the first battery-free wearable that has been explored so far. At the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, L’Oréal USA debuted its My UV Patch—a stretchable skin sensor that monitors UV exposure while also educating people about sun protection. It's just that while the L’Oréal My UV Patch provides a single-use skin sensor to monitor UV exposure, smart fabric wearables are a more advanced system that provides continuous, multi-signal health monitoring.
