Wireless Body Sensor Networks with Metamaterial Textiles

Wireless networks of sensors, displays, and smart devices on the body offer powerful capabilities for health monitoring, human-machine interfaces, and other emerging technological applications. Existing approaches for wireless interconnection, however, are limited by challenges in radiative loss, interference, and data vulnerability inherent to the radiation of radio-waves into the surrounding space. In this presentation, we describe an efficient and secure approach to interconnect wireless sensor networks by confining radio-waves on clothing patterned with conductive textiles. We demonstrate how these textile patterns, termed metamaterial textiles, can enhance wireless transmission (including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi) from commercial devices (smartphones) by many orders of magnitude and enable wireless power transfer to sensors on the body.