It’s dinner time and mommy isn’t ready with the food. What would kids do? Play drums on the dinning table of course! Isn’t that what everyone did when they were kids?
But now, kids can actually play the piano or the drums while sitting at the dinning table, that is when the work of these two technical textile experts go commercial.
Li Guo and Mats Johansson from Smart Textiles, a technology company based in the southern Swedish city of Boras, have developed a tablecloth that has both a drum kit and piano keys printed on the fabric and sensors below the material. Now, dinner can be more entertaining than ever before. Who knows, children will learn to play music and develop a knack for it much earlier than expected!
Johansson, who loves music, wanted to do something that would help his team combine music with textiles. “The special thing is, of course, that it is all from textile technologies. We have the woven cloth, but on that we had added prints for the piano, we added other laminated textile structures for the drums. And these are also from knitted fabrics. And then sewing as connectors or taping, so it is all technologies that we are familiar with in textiles now used for an entertaining purpose in this case,” Johansson reportedly told a international news agency.
Li Guo, who holds a doctorate in textile sensors, has been doing research on how to integrate these into garments. The tablecloth is partly made of conductive fibres that can carry current and convert it into signals.
“You can see that we have several different pins here, so they are actually functioning as sensors. So when you press one, you can actually switch it on. The technology behind this is sense capacitive coupling. So it senses any of the conductors and you know that human beings are conductors so when we put our finger on it, it actually switches on,” Li explained.
The technology is still being developed, but Li Guo sees many possibilities for this technical textile.
“Sensors can be of different kinds. Now we have touch sensors. We are also working on stretchable sensors and textile electronics that can get signals from heartbeats. This could help in monitoring health of family members without having to rush them to the hospital,” Li added.
According to Johansson, the most difficult part was to connect the soft material with hard electronics, one of the major challenges in smart textiles. “The problem today is where you get this change from the actual fabric to some kind of electronics — from soft flexible things to the rigid hardware — and of course the electricity, the batteries. They are difficult to make from the actual textiles. We are working on projects to make them more flexible and lighter,” he said.
The team believes that in the near future, there will be sensors in clothing that monitor and send data, making what you wear a tool to keep you healthy while making a fashion statement.
