Will Your Clothes Be Your New Passwords?

Researchers have developed new waterproof smart fabrics.

Carrying your keycards and hard disks, and remembering all of your passwords can become a real nuisance at times. There are apps to store your passwords, although it’s a risky business, but there’s no other alternative to carrying keycards and hard disks. You could forget them at home, or they could get stolen, or damaged. Can you think of a solution?

You might remember the smart textiles that are coming up in the market these days. Your clothes themselves might become your new passwords. They are made from a combination of conductive thread and electronics, to create a finished outfit, accessory, or stuffed toys that flash light and communicate. This same conductive thread also has magnetic properties that had not been explored by anyone until now.

Computer scientists at the University of Washington have fashioned a smart fabric using a novel approach. They tapped into the formerly uncharted magnetic properties of commercially available conductive thread to create electronic-free smart fabrics that can store data like identification tags and security codes. Justin Chan, lead author of the study, explained that “Conductive threads are typically used in smart-fabric designs as a wire to carry electricity from one point to another. What we discovered was that we could magnetize these threads using a magnet like a fridge magnet. We could then sense the thread’s presence or absence using a magnetometer, a sensor used to measure magnetic fields.”

Researchers used conventional sewing machines to make regular textiles out of these conductive threads. The magnetic poles of these threads are situated in an arbitrary manner. They rubbed a magnet across the fabric to manually align the poles in a single direction, either positive or negative, which would then correspond to the 0s and 1s of digital data.

The data stored in these fabrics can be read by magnetometers, which you will find already embedded in most smartphones today. These devices can determine directions, and are thus used to enable navigation apps such as GPS.

Researchers tested the technology by creating accessories like a wristband, necklace, belt, and tie and waving a smartphone across them to read the data. They also stored an electronic door’s password on a piece of conductive fabric attached to the cuff of a shirt. They were able to unlock the door by swinging the cuff in front of a whole range of magnetometers.

The only limitation these fabrics have is that their magnetic fields lose strength by around 30 percent over a week, much like your typical hotel key cards. But on the other hand, they can also be magnetized and programmed several times, thus rendering them reusable. The biggest plus point they have against electronic-based smart textiles is that they can be washed and dried in a machine without incurring any damage, and ironed at up to 320 degrees Fahrenheit as well. This is made possible by the absence of any electronics whatsoever in these new smart fabrics. Not being water-resistant is the major downside of other smart textiles, making them unsuitable for public use.

The magnetized fabric is also capable of interacting with a smartphone still inside the pocket. The scientists made gestures at the smartphone with a glove which had conductive fabric at its fingertips. Each gesture leads to a particular response from the phone such as playing or pausing music. It was able to identify six different gestures with 90 percent accuracy — back click, click, upward and downward swipe, and left and right flicks. This would provide further convenience to smartphone users, as they would be able to do small things without taking their phones out of their pockets. We would all love that, wouldn’t we?

Chan has 2 main applications in mind for their fabrics. One would make it possible to integrate invisible tags within clothing sold at stores, so that could be minimized and employees would easily be able to scan clothes. Secondly he wants to replace RFID keycards with magnetized cuffs within uniform shirts so that employees can access authorized areas more conveniently.

Turning this vision into reality would require them to store more information in these fabrics, which they will continue to work on. “Doing this would require developing our own customized threads, as well as an automatic and precise method of embedding and retrieving the data,” Chan said. Considering the future potential of these fabrics, we can only hope that they make their way into the market soon.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.