UCI invention lets people pay for purchases with a high-five

Imagine your car starting the moment you get in because it recognizes the jacket you’re wearing. Consider the value of a hospital gown that continuously measures and transmits a patient’s vital signs. These are just two applications made possible by a new body area network-enabling fabric invented by engineers at the University of California, Irvine.

In a paper published recently in Nature Electronics, researchers in UCI’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering detail how they integrated advanced metamaterials into flexible textiles to create a system capable of battery-free communication between articles of clothing and nearby devices.

The near-field communications protocol has enabled the growth in applications such as wireless device charging and powering of battery-free sensors, but a drawback of NFC has been its limited range of only a couple of inches. The UCI researchers extended the signal reach to more than 4 feet using passive magnetic metamaterials based on etched foils of copper and aluminum.

Because signals travel in the UCI-invented system via magnetic induction – versus the continuous hard-wire connections that had been state-of-the-art in smart fabrics – it’s possible to coordinate separate pieces of clothing. In athletic gear, pants can measure leg movements while communicating with tops that track heart rate and other stats.