Chemicals meet computers in a fusion between professors

Two professors have taken the idea of wearable computing a step further than Google Glass by working to create a fabric that would help humans interact with their environment.

Steven Levitan of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Anna Balazs of the Swanson School of Engineering recently received a five-year, $700,000 National Science Foundation grant to build upon their chemical and computational engineering research.

The work could have a huge impact by generating a new field of “materials that compute,” or systems where the computer and the material are the same entity, sensing, processing and reacting. The ability to create smart materials would enable new systems that could interface with humans to provide tactile, temperature and photonic inputs to smart clothing, robotic manipulators and — possibly — prosthetic limbs. 

“This work can lead to a new research discipline in computing and sensory-materials engineering that can transform human quality of life,” Balazs said.

Sara Peterson, a prosthetics coordinator and orthotics and prosthetics instructor from the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, thinks the idea could be used in both orthotic and prosthetic applications.

“Amputees currently do not have any haptic feedback in their current typical prosthetic sockets,” Peterson said, referring to communication using touch. “If the professors at Pitt can create a chemical-based computational fabric that could sense and respond to human motion, there would be applications for it in the field of prosthetics and orthotics.”

Using this material as part of a prosthesis could help people that have had severe burns to be able to feel again. The engineers’ research with this computing material could eventually help humans interact with their environment by acting as a tactile, temperature or light sensor.

Balazs has worked on modeling the oscillating gels known as Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) gels, while Levitan has worked on using electrical oscillators to do computing. BZ gels are known for pulsating and reacting without any external stimuli. Such a gel talks to itself, just as an amoeba communicates. Electrical oscillators, on the other hand, produce a repetitive electronic signal, and are used in various common devices such as radios, video games and beepers.

The National Science Foundation’s INSPIRE program, an awards program established to address some of the most complicated scientific problems that lie at the intersection of traditional disciplines, granted the award. Its purpose is to encourage investigators to submit bold proposals that some may consider to be at a disadvantage in a standard NSF review process. 

Both professors, who joined the engineering department at Pitt in 1987, decided to put the two ideas together to model chemical oscillators that compute.

Levitan said that he had heard of researchers studying the use of similar gels for computing through academic literature, so both professors decided to expand the concept. 

As of now, and for the next five years of the grant, they will focus their work on a model of the current idea.

They decided to put the gels in a thin sheet of fabric made of oscillating gel patches — almost like jello — and insert that into a larger fabric, which contains a piezoelectric film that would generate electricity when squeezed.

“We were talking about that and I was saying, ‘Could we use those things to do computing?’” Levitan said. 

The BZ gels will do the thinking and analyzing, with implications for movement or reaction to light.

“So if part of that gel also made a sandwich of that oscillating gel and piezoelectric film, you could get this thing to not only just oscillate but also generate electrical signals,” Levitan said. “And now if it generates electrical signals, we could talk about using it to do computing of some sort.”

The professors’ goal is to come up with a computer model of the idea and then have colleagues in other universities construct it, but the project is still in its initial stages.

“The ideal computing material would be lightweight and mechanically compliant and would sense and respond to human touch and motion in order to perform a level of computing that will enrich the life of the human wearing this fabric,” Balazs said in an email.

“The material would perform these ‘sense, compute and respond’ functions in a relatively autonomous manner, enabling it to operate without connections to an external power supply.”

Balazs, who is a world expert on computer modeling of the BZ chemical reaction, said this work seeks to achieve these objectives by investigating the coevolution of energy-transducing soft materials such as oscillating chemical gels and modes of computation, which can exploit these materials’ characteristics. 

Balazs and Levitan have worked on projects together before, but this is their biggest one yet. The next five years of the grant will consist of developing several different models that will change in accuracy over time. Levitan said that if they get experimentalists to help and give feedback, it could move faster.

The type of computing isn’t number-crunching, it’s recognizing patterns or doing things such as measuring heartbeat and carrying out an interaction that’s based on some sensory response. 

“And then maybe, eventually, people could use that where the computing would get some sensory data like temperature of skin or movement or maybe pressure-sensitive like a fingerprint recognizer,” Levitan said.

In terms of its tentative image when developed, it would look like a fabric that could be worn as a jacket with a thin, multi-layered jello-like sheet and a wire mesh-like netting with the addition of other electronics, such as nodes and buttons, connected to it.

Levitan hopes that his project with Balazs will spark interest in future endeavors that will combine their two fields.

“What’s exciting to me is not so much what we’re going to do but maybe inspiring other groups to also look at this notion of using chemistry and computing together, and that’s sort of the overriding idea,” Levitan said.