You know what would be great, especially as we barrel toward an increasingly sweaty future thanks to climate change? Clothes that don’t just wick away sweat, but actively cool you down. Imagine going for a jog under a blazing summer sun, but your shirt, socks, or even your underwear actually cool your skin. According to engineers at MIT, who published their findings in Nature, that dream may not be a distant glint on the horizon.
Hydrogel is a squishy material that’s mostly made up of water. The researchers at MIT have come up with a new version of it that’s packed with microscopic air tunnels inspired by the way human lungs move oxygen.
Hydrogels have mostly been used for medical applications, like patches, wound dressings, and wearable health monitors of various kinds. They work, but they all had the same flaw: they trap heat and sweat against your skin until that monitor or patch or whatever gets unpleasantly soggy.
MIT’s version breathes.
Scientists Made a Hydrogel That Stays Stretchy While Letting Skin Breathe
Not literally. The material, which is about 70 percent water, is filled with tiny air channels that let oxygen, water vapor, and heat escape while the material stays soft and stretchy. In early tests, volunteers exercised while wearing the hydrogel under heart monitors. Conventional patches produced less reliable readings because all that moisture made the thing lose some of its stickiness and therefore some of its reliability.
The new stuff kept skin cool while preventing sweat buildup, and all while delivering clean ECG results even after being worn for 10 straight days. The material proved to be about 10 times more breathable than conventional hydrogels and retained about 95 percent of its airflow even after being stretched 10,000 times.
The numbers are impressive, too. The material was roughly ten times more breathable than conventional hydrogels and retained about 95 percent of its airflow even after being stretched 10,000 times. It’s going to take a lot for your washing machine to eventually destroy the stuff she’d ever get turned into clothing.
Will it ever get turned into, let’s say, a self-cooling shirt or a pair of athletic undies that keeps your junk relatively dry and refrigerated? Maybe, but we’re still a long way off from that. The human testing only involved a handful of volunteers. The material still needs to be scaled up, and then there are the headaches of the manufacturing process and the pesky matter of whether it could even get regulatory approval.
But if all that happens one day, you might find yourself wearing clothes (or maybe just a new kind of medical patch) that ignore heat and sweat better than anything before it.
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