LSU Researcher Develops Smart Textile That Detects Fever in Infants

As a knit hat is the first piece of clothing a newborn wears, an LSU researcher is exploring ways to use the knit hat as ‘smart clothing’, one that combines functional and cotton yarn to detect the temperature.

Assistant Professor of Textiles, Apparel Design and Merchandising at Louisiana State University, Sibei Xia is working on creating ‘smart clothes’ that can track a newborn’s body temperature and respond accordingly. The knit hat can detect changes in the baby’s temperature. Its yarns will change into different shades and alert on temperature rise.

“If the newborn’s temperature goes really high, it’s going to change the hat to a beige colour, so that we don’t have to necessarily measure the temperature that often or use other technologies to monitor temperature,” Xia said.

Thermochromic technology may reduce the need for invasive technologies in order to monitor the temperature and somehow it will reduce the disturbance too for a newborn.

“One requirement of wearable technology is to make it really close to our body, and that can be achieved perfectly through knitting technology,” she said.

The threshold temperature for thermochromic yarn can be altered by adding additional yarns or altering the knitting pattern. Xia’s research explores different yarn colours, knitting structures and threshold temperatures to determine which combination produces the desired colour-changing effect.

The Provost’s Fund for Innovation in Research is funding this emerging research. The funding will be used to test the threshold temperature that is most accurate for infants and machines to design clothing.