INNOVATION September-October 2015

By combining ultra-thin, nanofibre technology with textiles and electronics, Servati’s team at UBC works to engineer comfortable, solar-powered fabrics that collect wearers’ health data. PHOTOS, THIS AND FACING PAGE: WENDY D

The key, says UBC associate professor of electrical and computer engineering Peyman Servati, P.Eng., is in figuring out how to make smart stretchable fabrics. “It’s not enough that we can put conventional sensors into fabrics,” he says. “We want the sensors to become part of the structure of the fabric itself and then be stretchable enough to move and be comfortable. People have to want to wear them.” They have to want to wear them and see a clear purpose to wearing them. As Google Glass and a few smartwatch makers recently discovered, not everyone desires large, expensive and/or geeky-looking general consumer devices that provide primarily only entertainment value. But if the device’s purpose is clear and the wearable is truly wearable, the oft-hinted-at potential of this kind of technology will finally be realized—and the way we live, work and play could change profoundly. Recently, emerging technologies analyst IDTechEx estimated that the wearable technology business, which includes both e-textiles and wearable devices, will rocket from US$20 billion in 2015 to about US$70 billion in 2025. United Kingdom market-forecaster Juniper Research thinks it will go even higher, predicting a US$80- billion industry within five years. Most of that growth, experts agree, will be driven by e-textiles rather than devices, and will hinge on the success of projects like Servati’s. Along with his team at UBC’s Flexible Electronics and Energy Lab, and in collaboration with researcher Frank Ko—whose recent projects have included developing aircraft “skin” that can sense changes in the environment and detect small cracks on the surface of the plane—Servati focusses on combining ultra-thin, nanofibre technology with textiles and electronics to meet

two different ends: harnessing and storing solar power, and collecting reliable health data. “A typical solar cell is both rigid and expensive to install,” he says. “We are working on flexible fabrics that can both generate and store electricity economically.” Short battery life is, without doubt, the biggest constraint on current smart technology. Solving that problem could mean that the jacket you throw on for your regular mid- morning trek for coffee could also power your phone for the rest of the day. At the same time, the awning outside your window could charge your laptop, while the fabric of your tent could ensure you have light and heat even in the darkest, coldest woods. And, of course, greater use of solar power by larger numbers of the population decreases use of other, more expensive, less clean resources. But while flexible solar cells have obvious and immediate applications and benefits, Servati views the world of healthcare as the next frontier for smart fabrics. “This is where the cutting edge is. Over the next five or six years, I think we will see a huge growth in using textiles to collect useful and trustable information about the person wearing them,” he says. “With novel sensing material, you have contact with the body that can reveal physiological signs, respiration, heart rate, and so on. There are accelerometer products out now that can track activity, but there are limits to their usefulness. You can put a tracker on your pet and get the same activity data.” Servati and his team envision a shirt or a sock—or perhaps a dressing gown or even a patch applied directly to the skin—that allows doctors and patients to obtain real-time information on a range of health indicators, such as the tremors experienced by a patient with Parkinson’s disease.

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