Digital Fibers and Fused Novel Multifunctionality in Fabrics

Fabrics are uniquely positioned all around the warfighter and are exposed to a wealth of information that exists as signals emanating from both inside and outside of the body, such as heartbeat, respiration, sweat composition, bleeding, speech, air quality, ambient temperature, the sound of a discharge of a firearm, a proximal blast, the presence of a chemical toxin, or the hum of a drone. These signals could provide important insights on the soldier’s physiological status, health, injury and the surrounding environment if only fabrics could sense, store, compute, infer, communicate, and act. Functional nanostructured fibers are now setting the stage for computing fabrics. The objective of this study is to explore the basic scientific and engineering underpinnings to enable the realization of the first operational fabric computer made in its entirety from fibers, designed to enhance warfighter survivability and efficacy. The nanostructured fabric will fuse multimodal sensing, memory, processing, power, and communications, and importantly contain customized algorithms to sense the environment both internal and external to the Soldier, infer context and even initiate action, all this while being capable of extended periods of autonomous operation for power-scarce and communication-denied environments. The culmination of this effort will be a fully functional, field-programmable fabric system that can dynamically address mission-specific needs through software applications to enable contextualized understanding including physiological state, health and injury status, and threat detection to enhance situational awareness.