Shu Yang of Penn Engineering and Randall Kamien of the School of Arts & Sciences are teaming up with a researcher at Drexel to make a new kind of wearable health tracking device that gathers information from its wearer through his or her sweat.

This Penn-Drexel collaboration aims to develop a garment, knitted out of smart yarn that will chemically analyze the wearer’s sweat. A student in the Yang Lab, Weerapha Panatdasirisuk has already hand-knit the first strands of the team’s nanoscale yarn into braids.

What if everything ‘smart’ about your smartwatch was in the band? This is what Shu, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science and Randall, the Vicki and William Abrams Professor in the Natural Sciences in the School of Arts & Sciences (SAS), intend to find out.

The researchers are teaming up with Genevieve Dion, director of the Shima Seiki Haute Technology Lab at Drexel University, with the goal of making a new kind of wearable health tracking device: where the “smarts” are embedded in the fabric itself.

The team recently received a $100,000 grant from the Keck Futures Initiative, a project of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that supports forward-thinking, highly interdisciplinary collaboration to develop a garment that gathers health information from its wearer through his or her sweat. They plan to achieve this by spinning nanotechnology-inspired yarn that can be knitted like its conventional counterparts.

Instead of absorbing the sweat, the team’s yarn will be able to chemically analyze its contents and change color of the garment accordingly.

Wearable technology requires materials that are both flexible and functional so that developers often look to polymers or to make harder materials as thin as possible.