Irmandy Wicaksono

Go to any hospital or rehab center and you’ll see patients hooked up to bulky medical wearables—like heart rate monitors, thermometers, and electrodes—feeding data to nearby machines. Unfortunately, those devices are usually uncomfortable to wear, and prohibitively expensive for home use.

Irmandy Wicaksono, 31, has created prototype textiles that can measure pressure points, respiration, and heart rate, and discern human activities in real time. Importantly, the fabrics, which he designed to be manufactured using industrial knitting machines, are durable enough for everyday use. They can withstand being washed—and potentially even the rigors of being worn as part of a space suit.

Wicaksono’s textiles are unique in that sensors, conductors, and communication channels are woven directly into the yarns of the fabric. And because his textiles are molded using thermoplastics—nylon yarn that’s heated during the manufacturing process to create complex contours and shapes—his health-sensing garments can be custom-designed for comfort and style. 

In one project, Wicaksono created a shirt that could sense a runner’s heart rate, respiration patterns, and physical movements, and output data for a live heat map of their skin temperature. In another, he built a shoe to analyze when a soccer player adjusted their gait and balance. In yet another, he demonstrated both a sock and a yoga mat able to infer the wearer’s poses and movements with around 99 percent accuracy. 

The culmination of his recent work is a space suit combining his sensing fabrics with pneumatic sleeves—automatically applying compression as needed to mitigate some of the cardiovascular risks of long-term spaceflight.

He hopes such prototypes, alongside smart textiles added to furniture and rugs, will eventually be used to monitor medical and rehab patients at home without intrusive procedures or hard-to-schedule appointments. Doctors or nurses could be alerted any time the fabrics picked up an abnormal reading or logged a workout.