Rahul Panat, an engineering professor at Washington State University’s Voiland College, and his colleagues Professor Indranath Dutta and graduate student Yeasir Arafat, recently demonstrated a significant advance in flexible electronics by showing that the metal indium, deposited as a thin film on a polymer substrate, can be stretched to twice its length without breaking—“a quantum improvement,” Panat says, over current methods.
Read about wearable electronics and flexible conductors in “Smart Couture.”
Wearable electronics are leaving the lab and hitting the runway
From smart phones to FitBits, mobile electronics have been woven into the very fabric of our lives. But things are about to get a lot more literal as e-devices begin to be incorporated into the clothing we wear.
Imagine a “smart” shirt or other item of clothing that can monitor your biometrics and ping your doctor when something is out of the ordinary. Or, to manage diabetes, we’ll use a contact lens or pair of glasses to monitor blood glucose levels—and leave behind forever the expensive and annoying finger prick test kit. But wearable … » More …