Fabric-Based Wearable Battery Proves Powerful Enough to Drive a Textile Body Area Network Wearable

An international team of researchers has unveiled a new design of battery, based around zinc-ion fibers, which they say could be the perfect way to power wearables — offering a stretchable, lightweight, and relatively low-cost fabric.

"Electronic textiles (e-textiles), having the capability of interacting with the human body and surroundings, are changing our everyday life in fundamental and meaningful ways," the team writes in the paper unveiling the new battery. "Yet, the expansion of the field of e-textiles is still limited by the lack of stable and bio-compatible power sources with aesthetic designs."

That's where the zinc-ion fiber battery comes in: Designed to be embedded into the fabric itself, the battery fibers are thin, lightweight, and can stretch to 230 percent of their original length — yet hold 91 watt-hours per liter of material and proved capable of surviving over 1,000 charge-discharge cycles over 500 hours while retaining 98 percent of their original capacity.

To prove the concept, the team fabricated a wearable Textile Body Area Network (TBAN), driven by a Microchip ATmega328 microcontroller and a Texas Instruments CC2450 Bluetooth module for communication. A Soon SON1303 provided heart rate estimation, while a Bosch BME280 environmental sensor picked up temperature, humidity, and air pressure. Finally, a WPC Qi-standard charging coil was added for wireless charging.

"Smart clothes are our goal," lead author Xiao Xiao explains in an interview with IEEE Spectrum. "We believe that a fiber-battery-powered TBAN will become the direction of future smart clothes, and this work will provide a promising roadmap toward personalized healthcare. Our goal is to make the smart fabric comfortable to use outside, and durable for outdoor activities such as mountain climbing and hiking."

More information is available in the IEEE Spectrum article, while the paper has been published in the journal Science Advances under open-access terms.