The potential for penetrative bodily injury is a daily risk taken by those in the military, law enforcement, and other high-risk occupations. If the injured are unable to call for help or are too far away to be observed, a timely means of remote detection is necessary to facilitate the delivery of potentially life-saving aid, as the probability of survival decreases with the passage of time.
To address this issue, a "smart fabric" was developed for integration into uniforms that is capable of detecting penetrative injuries indicated by acute disruptions in the fabric caused by bullets, knives, or shrapnel. The fabric was created using an innovative idea by interweaving conductive thread into wearable fabric in orthogonal arrangements, and utilizing headers, shift registers, multiplexers, a Wheatstone bridge, and customized Arduino code to determine which conductive threads were disrupted, thereby providing the "XY" coordinates of the rupture in the fabric, which correspond to the location of the penetrative injury. This information is then transmitted to a remote monitoring system to promptly alert of the rupture and corresponding location of the underlying bodily injury.
After multiple modeling iterations, 50 exercises were conducted in which the fabric was impaled, and in all cases, the system was able to remotely detect and accurately determine the precise location of the simulated penetrative injury on the fabric. These results demonstrate the feasibility of using this system as a method of remote detection and localization of penetrative injuries.
Project Paper
Animation of Concept
Project Presentation
