WOULD YOU WEAR A T-SHIRT THAT COULD LISTEN TO YOU?

Futuristic fabrics might let your clothes eavesdrop on you.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, have created fabrics that can ‘hear’ sounds.

Publishing in Nature, they describe their fabric yarn interwoven with an electrical, or ‘piezoelectric’ fibre. The resulting fabric uses a mechanism similar to the tympanic membrane: the fabric converts pressure waves at audible frequencies into mechanical vibrations which can be processed into electrical signals.

Only a small quantity of the fibre is needed to make fabric acoustically sensitive. Researchers say garments could be useful for police officers to narrow down the direction of a gunshot, for people with hearing aids to listen in specific directions while removing background noise, or even as a wearable stethoscope.

All this, and the fabric is able to withstand being chucked in the washing machine at the end of a long day of listening.