A world in which the clothes you wear can monitor your health vitals is now one step closer to reality.
A group of researchers at Brown, the Rhode Island School of Design and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed “single-fiber computers”: synthetic fibers with computing capabilities that can be woven with natural fibers to turn everyday clothes into wearable health devices.
“There’s tons of data coming out from humans, and it’s coming out from all different parts of our body,” said Nikhil Gupta, a material science and engineering graduate student at MIT and co-first author of the research paper published in February. He added that wearable technologies can help perform electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms and measure important medical vitals like heart rate and glucose and cortisol levels.
“To diagnose anything, you need information on the state of the human body,” Gupta said. “Being able to characterize these biochemical and biophysical signals in real time is crucial to understand the wearer’s health.”
This single-fiber computer can not only sense physiological signals, but also “store data, process them and then communicate out valuable health insights to the wearer in real time” through sensors, batteries and other embedded microdevices, Gupta said.
Even though wearable technologies like smart watches and smart accessories exist, these devices “come in this rigid form, which is not mechanically matched to the human body” and can cause discomfort to the wearer, Gupta explained.
Rather than measuring health information from a single location on the body — like a watch on the wrist — clothing composed of the newly developed fiber “can collect data from all parts of the body, closer to the organs at which signals are created,” Gupta added.
“Clothes are something that everyone wears,” he said. “We wanted to create something that looks, feels and behaves like a normal fabric, but has the functionalities of a computer.”
“Our research successfully developed a seamless method for integrating functional fibers directly into fabric construction and garment sewing processes,” wrote Vivian Li ’25, a computer science concentrator at Brown and a co-author of the paper, in an email to The Herald.
“These fibers are robust enough to be washable and withstand extreme conditions, creating opportunities for physiological monitoring and increased access to health data through garments that fit naturally into everyday life,” she added.
The research combined insights from fields like electrical engineering, material science, textile design and computer science. Discussing the cross-institutional collaboration in the research, Gupta said that meshing textile design with engineering required “constant feedback in order to make the engineering design smarter.”
This feedback also aimed to help “designers to understand how the engineering components fit into traditional fabric formation techniques like knitting and weaving,” Gupta added.
Ella Son, a textile designer with a master’s of fine arts from RISD and a co-author of the paper, assisted in weaving the computer fibers with natural ones. Son emphasized the challenges of working with the computer fibers, particularly due to the fragility of the “waveguide” — a component that is used to help “navigate the electronic interaction” and that would frequently break during the “laborious” weaving process.
Gupta shared that U.S. military personnel are currently testing out merino mesh shirts integrated with the fiber computers in the extreme conditions of the Arctic. He added that these shirts will “provide real-time information about (the military personnel’s) health and activity.”
Future improvements to the technology will focus on “increasing the fiber functionality and decreasing the size, so it continues to feel more and more like traditional yarn and textiles,” Gupta added.
