Textile Display for Electronic and Brain-Interfaced Communications

Adv Mater. 2018 May;30(18):e1800323. doi: 10.1002/adma.201800323. Epub 2018 Mar 23.

Abstract

Textile displays are poised to revolutionize current electronic devices, and reshape the future of electronics and related fields such as biomedicine and soft robotics. However, they remain unavailable due to the difficulty of directly constructing electroluminescent devices onto the textile-like substrate to really display desired programmable patterns. Here, a novel textile display is developed from continuous electroluminescent fibers made by a one-step extrusion process. The resulting displaying textile is flexible, stretchable, three-dimensionally twistable, conformable to arbitrarily curved skins, and breathable, and can dynamically display a series of desired patterns, making it useful for bioinspired electronics, soft robotics, and electroluminescent skins, among other applications. It is demonstrated that these displaying textiles can also communicate with a computer and mouse brain for smart display and camouflage applications. This work may open up a new direction for the integration of wearable electroluminescent devices with the human body, providing new and promising communication platforms.

Keywords: brain-interfaced communications; electroluminescent fiber; textile display.