The problem with knobs and buttons on the dashboards of cars is that they require the person doing the adjusting to move their focus from the road, to the controls and this, says New Scientist, causes far more accidents than most people realize. It’s just such reasoning that has led materials scientist to create a new type of durable fabric that can also serve as a touch sensitive interface for performing some of the functions now carried out by knobs and buttons in cars.
The new fabric, created by Stephan Gorgutsa, Jian Feng Gu and Maksim Skorobogatiy of Genie Physique, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, as they explain in their paper published in Smart Materials and Structures, has very tiny embedded wires that can sense human electrical signals and then pass them along to a small computer in the seat that converts them to signals that devices can respond to, when someone sitting in the seat, say, lightly drags their finger along a certain section of the seat just next to them.
New Scientist says that the technology works in a way similar to touchpads on iPads and other similar devices. It works because the human body produces very tiny amounts of electricity which the brain uses to send messages down nerve pathways that tell all of our various body parts what to do. New advances in technology have made it possible to hear those signals when they are emitted, making possible all kinds of new sensing devices.
In the case of the new car set fabric, different parts of the fabric can have different types of wires embedded in it to sense different types of things, thus allowing for touch sensitive controls to be placed close together without the driver having to fumble about trying to figure out which is which. To turn up the radio for example, a simple finger movement along a thin stretch of material that differs in texture from the surrounding fabric to let the user know they have found it, can cause the volume to rise when stroked in one direction and to lower when moving the other way.
The new technology is part of a wave of so-called “smart fabrics” that respond to people or even environmental factors such as temperature and humidity. And while the researchers freely admit that other similar type fabrics have been tried in the past, they say that the fact that none of them have made it into production vehicles stands testament to their failure to stand up to durability tests, something they say their fabric can do.