Thread-based computer could be knitted into clothes to monitor health

Wearable technology could go beyond smartwatches to items of clothing that monitor large parts of your body

By Alex Wilkins

26 February 2025

A computer thread being braided with metal and textile yarns to make potential clothing

Hamilton Osoy, IFM

Stretchy computers on threads that can be stitched into clothes could be used to record whole-body data that most medical sensors can’t pick up.

Wearable technologies, such as smartwatches, monitor signals from the body like heart rate or temperature, but typically only from a single spot. This can give an incomplete picture of how the body is functioning.

Read more

Quantum computers teleport and store energy harvested from empty space

Advertisement

Now, Yoel Fink at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues have developed a computer that can be stitched into clothes, made from chips that are connected in a thread of copper and elastic fibre.

The thread has 256 kilobytes of on-board memory, around that of a simple calculator, as well as sensors that can detect temperature, heart rate and body movements. It also has Bluetooth so that various threads can communicate.

This means they can collectively gather location-specific data on the body, which could theoretically be used by an artificial intelligence to monitor a person’s health more accurately, says Fink. “We’re getting very close to a point where we could write apps for fabrics and begin to monitor our health and do all kinds of things that a phone, frankly, cannot do.”