Azerbaijani scholar Tural Khudiyev has been involved in a research to create the first fiber with digital capabilities.
Born in Azerbaijan, Khudiyev is a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The unique fiber created at MIT, is able to sense, store, analyze, and infer activity after being sewn into a shirt. The digital fiber contains memory, temperature sensors, and a trained neural network program for inferring physical activity.
Tural Khudiyev who is doing postdoctoral research at MIT, along with MIT PhD student Gabriel Loke, is the lead author of the paper on digital fiber, while the senior author of the study is Yoel Fink, professor of MIT.
Digital fibers expand the possibilities for fabrics to uncover the context of hidden patterns in the human body that could be used for physical performance monitoring, medical inference, and early disease detection, according to MIT’s website.
The new fiber was created by placing hundreds of square silicon microscale digital chips into a preform that was then used to create a polymer fiber. By precisely controlling the polymer flow, the researchers were able to create a fiber with continuous electrical connection between the chips over a length of tens of meters.
The fiber itself is thin and flexible and can be passed through a needle, sewn into fabrics, and washed at least 10 times without breaking down.
