Knitting, whether warp or weft uses a micromechanical structure with “n” degrees of freedom. To you and me that means it can form over almost any organic shape and then return to it’s original shape when removed. Think stretchy t-shirt over your “god like bodies” and then back to t-shirt shape after a wash and iron in your clothes draw.

The mechanism that allows this magical recovery is the knitted stitch. These brilliant structures move, slide, expand, contract and interact at the microscale to allow the “knitting” to move as your body moves.

The interaction is where the magic happens. Controlling the interaction between the stitch loops or the fibre (staple or filament) or both is how the technology is able to measure movement. Why bother?

Controlling the structures at this level is like controlling the atomic structure of metal. These points of interaction and hence movement are where a lot of the physical properties of said metal arise. Hardness, conductivity etc., all arise because of the structure. This is why Footfalls does what it does. Controlling that interaction gathers a multitude of data unseen and unavailable to other sensing systems.

When a knitted structure moves, the yarn to yarn interactions change in number and size. In addition the fibre to fibre interactions change massively from barely any contact to acting like an electrically conductive wire. Spending, hours, weeks and years understanding the basics of these interactions is why textile sensing is the future.

Even though this “idea” is over 20 years old , the team at Footfalls is just scratching the surface, excuse the pun. The interactions allow us to measure how you move and therefore how you sleep, walk, run, dance or even relax. We look at your body, in totality, not your wrist or finger. We use the “stretchiness” of knitting to measure the appropriate body part or area rather than using an correlation of a correlation. We don’t add to your digital devices that end up in a draw, we place the technology into a substrate that you interact with 99% of the day and 99% of your time alive.

Marvel at a craft that will change societal health forever and help all humanity. The craft may be thousands of years old, a mystery to most of those who wear or interact with it but it can and it will use some of the most intelligent micromechanical structures on earth to change how we make health and wellbeing for all a proactive rather than reactive aspiration.

A simple story about knitting. Knitting, but not as your granny knows it. Knitting as the FUTURE.

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