Electronic devices are no longer limited to conventional systems with a screen, keyboard and processing components. Over the past decades, some electronics engineers have been developing thin electronic fibers that could be used to create wearable devices or flexible sensors for robots.

Despite their potential, electronic fibers can be difficult to assemble reliably into components or devices for specific applications. In a paper published in Nature Electronics, researchers at Donghua University in China introduced a new manufacturing method to build customizable circuits directly inside electronic fibers.

“This work grew out of a simple question: Can a soft fiber be more than a carrier for electronics and instead become the circuit itself?” Hengda Sun, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “For embodied intelligence, electronic systems need to conform to complex, moving robot bodies while combining sensing, information processing and interaction.”