Reconfigurable Fabric: Clothing That Could Save Your Life

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 deliver 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," said 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," said 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 is constantly gathered and analyzed by the vest's sensors, such as heart rate, blood flow or muscle activity. 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's necessary, and then only in the correct amount. "Consider the angina patient," said 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," said 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," said 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," said 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," said Yang. "But in certain situations such decision-making ability may be useful. 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," Yang said.

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.

 

-Christopher Sutton