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Clothing that Can Save Your Life
Reconfigurable
Fabric
by Christopher Sutton
UCLA computer scientist Majid Sarrafzadeh is designing a vest you
won't find at The Gap.
Embedded within the fabric of the vest are circuits, sensors, and
actuators that can monitor a patient's vital signs and treat symptoms
with a customized dose of medication whenever a patient shows signs
of distress.
Sarrafzadeh hopes that people who suffer from high-blood pressure,
angina, and a host of other ailments will one day wear the vest
as part of their medical care.
“Using flexible electronic components woven into the fabric of a
garment,” explains Sarrafzadeh, “patients will have a personalized
drug-delivery system that is mobile and sensor-driven.”
The research group is in the early stages of a three-year project,
begun in September and supported by $1.8 million from the National
Science Foundation. A team of engineers from computer science, electrical
engineering and materials science joins Sarrafzadeh, who hopes to
build a prototype by this spring.
Lightweight health monitoring devices, including heart pressure
monitors weighing as little as 40 ounces, are already commercially
available. Several university research groups are experimenting
with “wearable computing” -- shirts and jackets with different kinds
of computational ability.
However, UCLA’s RFabVest, or reconfigurable fabric vest, will be
different because in addition to its monitoring abilities, the vest
will house actuators that can deliver medication to the wearer if
a health- related problem occurs.
The UCLA researchers admit that adding this level of functionality
is going to be a challenge.
“Monitoring and collecting data is much easier than attempting something
like drug delivery,” says Sarrafzadeh. “Any vest must be extremely
tolerant of abuse from the wearer and the environment in general.”
How does it work? Physiological and environmental information such
as heart rate, blood flow or muscle activity is constantly gathered
and analyzed by the vest’s sensors. At the first sign of anything
abnormal, such as a spike in blood pressure, built-in actuators
react by delivering medication through the skin, effectively and
painlessly.
While its sensors can trigger the delivery of a drug, the vest can
also modulate the drug, so that the patient only receives treatment
when it is necessary, and then only in the correct amount.
“Consider an angina patient,” says Sarrafzadeh. “When he has an
attack, he could take a pill but it may be too late for that. Or
he could wear a patch, but after 24 hours of continuous delivery
the drug becomes ineffective. The treatment could be more precise.”
Sarrafzadeh argues that traditional methods of administering drugs
-- tablets, capsules, sprays, ointments and patches -- all share
the same flaw; once administered, the drug cannot be “turned off”
and after hours of continuous exposure, the patient may no longer
benefit from the medication’s healing effects. Since the RFabVest
will be able to turn its drug delivery function on and off, it will
provide “down time” when a patient does not need the drug.
Many other research groups are working hard to devise innovative
materials to house the sensors and actuators that comprise flexible
electronics. In fact, the arena of “e-textiles” is quite crowded,
and no one has yet made a fabric that is truly comfortable to wear.
Though the UCLA group is focusing more closely on the computational
ability of the vest, Sarrafzadeh has enlisted the aid of materials
science professor Yang Yang to consider the challenge of making
the vest wearable.
Yang is using soft semi-conducting materials to make flexible wires
that can be bent as much as 180 degrees, which means the vest’s
hardware will be able to take much more abuse from its user -- even
rips and tears.
“The electronic components that are being fitted into the garment
should not be limited by silicon technology, as our desktops are,”
notes Yang. “They must share the same flexible qualities our clothes
have to be truly wearable.”
More immediate challenges, such as computing power, are being addressed
by the team, which includes UCLA professors Glen Reinman, Benjamin
Wu, Deborah Estrin and Mani Srivastava.
“There are real trade-offs in terms of computational power and communication
power,” explains Sarrafzadeh. “It’s not a matter of taking a traditional
system and placing it in a flexible form. There are resource constraints,
environmental challenges and much more.”
In order for the RFabVest to work, one characteristic it must possess
is reconfigurability. “The circuitry must be problem-oriented, rigged
to perform different tasks and solve various problems as they arise,”
says Sarrafzadeh, who has worked in the field of reconfigurable
computing for more than 15 years. “And it has to be able to take
whatever the environment throws at it.”
The vest will be designed so that if computation is interrupted
in one area, resources are moved to other parts of the vest, allowing
its sensors and actuators to continue to function normally. This
is essential for making the RFabVest safe and reliable, so Sarrafzadeh
has turned to professors Estrin and Srivastava for help. “Deborah
and Mani are world-class researchers in the area of sensors. Their
expertise has been a real asset.”
Assuming the vest can survive the rigors of the real world, just
how much autonomous decision-making should the RFabVest have?
“Of course, if I were to wear this kind of garment, I’d want to
know who puts what in my body,” says Yang. “But in certain situations
such independent decision-making ability may be useful. For a firefighter
knocked out by smoke, for example, or a patient who has an attack
while sleeping, the vest can act as a kind of alarm and may even
be able to administer a drug to save the person. But we have a lot
of time to determine the specific uses, and it will never replace
our need for real-life doctors.”
The RFabVest could be used in other ways. It could be incorporated
into uniforms for astronauts, soldiers, security guards or police.
Further into the future, the researchers imagine office workers
could pitch their palm pilots and wear them instead.
For additional information on the project, please visit http://rfab.cs.ucla.edu/index.html
Photo: Todd
Cheney, UCLA Photography |
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