Watch: Clothing that could charge your phone

With the continuous advent of impressive technological advances like Amazon drone delivery, smart homes, and the development of artificial intelligence, it seems like not much else could surprise people these days. But what about being able to charge your phone just by putting it in your pocket?

The team at Deakin University’s Institute for Frontier Materials (IFM) have been working to develop clothing fibres capable of storing energy. This means parts of clothing like pockets or shirt patches would have enough energy to charge small devices, like your phone.

The fibres are made up of an energy-storing material called MXene, combined with a small amount of ‘spinnable’ graphene. MXene is made out of small sheets of carbon and titanium and is not typically spinnable. By integrating the MXene with graphene sheets, the combined materials wrinkle together into a strand of knittable high-tech fibre.

The project was fronted by Associate Professor Joselito Razal and led by Dr Shayan Seyedin from Deakin University, both of whom co-authored a publication about the energy-storing fibre. Dr Seyedin says the project is a huge achievement: ‘the potential impact of this breakthrough is enormous, as it can result in wearable energy storing textiles…you can have energy with you all the time.’

Watch the video below to find out more about the future of wearable technology.

Learn more about technology and how our everyday accessories are propelling us forward by looking at how wearable technology could be the future of footy.