Led by Assistant Professor John Ho, a team from the NUS Institute for Health Innovation and Technology, designed the pattern of the web-like threads to relay electromagnetic signals from a nearby smartphone to sensors on the body as far as a meter away, providing power and data connectivity across the suit.
The team took about two years to develop the technology and its research findings were published in Nature Communications earlier this year, where they proved that it was possible to relay a smartphone's near-field communication (NFC) signal to different locations on the body with specially designed inductive patterns.
논문에서
practical and convenient acquisition of spatially distributed physiological signals is challenging because of the need to interconnect multiple sensors around the body. For instance, current clinical monitoring systems rely on wires to connect sensors to a central hub for powering and data acquisition, but such tethers constrain physical motion and have limited use outside of the clinic
Wireless technologies can be used to connect wearable sensors without physical constraints. In particular, radio-based wireless communication methods, such as Bluetooth and WiFi, are widely used to enable sensors to wirelessly communicate around the body for monitoring health and providing real-time clinical notifications. Unlike wired interconnects, however, these radio-based technologies require each sensor to be separately powered, typically using rigid batteries or bulky energy harvesters. These components limit the degree of skin conformability and user comfort that can be achieved, and require periodic replacement or availability of specialised energy sources for long-term function
In addition, the radiative nature of data transmission results in vulnerabilities to eavesdropping and necessitates the use of cryptography techniques to address privacy concerns
Near-field communication (NFC) is an alternative wireless technology in which sensors are inductively powered by a wireless reader. A major limitation of NFC technology, however, is that the sensors can function only within the near-field of the reader, which is at most a few centimetres for a mobile reader such as a smartphone
establish wireless power and data connectivity around the human body. Specifically, we use low-cost conductive threads and computer-controlled embroidery to integrate ordinary clothing with near-field-responsive inductor patterns that are capable of wirelessly connecting multiple skin-mounted sensors to a reader separated by up to a metre in distance through proximity to the functional patterns
Reference
Rongzhou Lin et al. Wireless battery-free body sensor networks using near-field-enabled clothing, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14311-2