A touchscreen you can wear: Singapore researchers weave a working display into a sleeve

A screen you can fold, wash and wear sounds like a contradiction — until you build the screen out of thread. At the National University of Singapore, a team led by Assistant Professor Tural Khudiyev has woven 54 fibres into a sleeve, each fibre about a millimetre thick and carrying 96 tiny LEDs, together forming a 96-by-54-pixel display that senses touch: press a fibre and the nearest pixel lights up. The sleeve runs a calculator, a photo gallery and video at 30 frames per second, in 8-bit colour, and it survived 50 detergent washes. Getting there meant integrating more than 5,000 chips through over 20,000 electrical connections inside strands thin enough to wear. Published in Nature, the work points toward clothing that could one day show health readings on the garment itself — a display with no rigid device strapped on.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation