Body-coupled smart fibers: Enhancing seamless integration and efficiency in medical human-machine interaction

Human-machine interaction (HMI) has always been at the frontier of technological innovation, making our interactions with technology more intuitive and efficient, as well as driving much of the research interest in this field. Wearable electronic systems can seamlessly and accurately receive, store, process, and output information. This endows them with tremendous potential applications ranging from daily life interactions to monitoring physiological signals and clinical medical treatments. Building upon this foundation, researchers have embarked on a series of innovations concerning textile fibers' materials, manufacturing techniques, and further functional payloads.1 However, integrating the textile electronic systems, which still primarily rely on the classic von Neumann architecture paradigm, consisting of sensors, actuators, energy storage, harvesters, and rigid silicon-based processors, with dynamic human bodies poses significant challenges.

Yang et al. reported in Science that a novel intelligent fiber integrates wireless energy harvesting, information sensing, and transmission functionalities and can interact with the human body.2 This study proposed an energy interaction mechanism based on “body-coupling,” enabling smart textiles woven according to this mechanism to achieve touch control, luminous display, and other HMI functions without relying on chips and batteries (Figure 1). This body-coupled optical fiber electronics technology can generate bound charge pairs between the body and electronic optical fibers, which can alternate between bound and radiative states to transmit sensing signals wirelessly. The proposed solution introduces electric-field-sensitive luminescent dielectrics into body-coupled interactive fibers (i-fibers) to utilize the human body’s high relative permittivity and conductivity to couple electromagnetic energy. This integrated design strategy efficiently overcomes the constraints of chips, batteries, and other rigid components.