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WKNC's Evie Dallmann speaks with Amanda Mills from the NC State Wilson College of Textiles about the evolution of smart textiles and the wearable electronics.
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Creators and Guests
Host
Shradha Bhatia
Public Affairs Director (2025-2026)
Producer
Evie Dallmann
Guest Producer (2025)
What is Eye on the Triangle?
Eye on the Triangle is WKNC 88.1 FM HD-1/HD-2’s weekly public affairs programming with news, interviews, opinion, weather, sports, arts, music, events and issues that matter to NC State, Raleigh and the Triangle.
Speaker 1: You are listening to Eye of the Triangle, WKNC's weekly public affairs program from the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
Speaker 1: Any views and opinions expressed during Eye of the Triangle do not represent NC State or student media.
Speaker 1: Hello everyone, I am Shradha Bhatia and I'm the public affairs director here at WKNC 88.1 eye on the triangle.
Speaker 1: And in today's episode, we'll hear from Evie Dalman and how she speaks with Amanda Mills from the NC State Wilson College of Textiles about the evolution of smart textiles and the wearable electronics.
Speaker 1: And later in this episode, we'll hear from the news on how end of transcript credit program would spike NCE health premium costs.
Speaker 2: This is Evie from WKNC talking to Amanda Mills from the Wilson College of Textiles about textiles technology and art.
Speaker 3: My background is in mechanical engineering.
Speaker 3: Actually, all my degrees that I've gotten throughout my education are in mechanical engineering.
Speaker 3: But I often say that is because I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up.
Speaker 3: When I came here to NC State for graduate school, I initially started working in stretchable electronics, working on physiological sensors, so monitoring body signals, things of that nature, and going through that process of building those sensors.
Speaker 3: I realized while the stretchable electronics was interesting and the sensor development was interesting, I was also very drawn to how they're packaged and how they're actually used in a product or in society.
Speaker 3: So I asked around.
Speaker 3: I found some other people doing research in that area, namely Dr. Jess Jor in Wilson College of Textiles, who, as he said, come on, he brought me on and I started taking textiles courses and learning a little bit more about garment design, knit structures, textile functionality, and how to design those so that you can integrate electronics and other functionalities within the textile itself, whether or not it's for a garment or say like a car seat or regardless of application.
Speaker 3: So the wearable electronics industry has always been interesting in the sense of one of the areas in which we're challenged is, well, my Fitbit or my Apple watch already does a lot of this.
Speaker 3: So why do I need to integrate this into a garment?
Speaker 3: And the best answer we have is, well, you wear your watch on your wrist.
Speaker 3: That is such a small snapshot.
Speaker 3: And by integrating these things into a garment or into the textiles that we interact on a day to day basis, you get that much more data and that many more insights into both your environmental exposure, how you interact with the world around you.
Speaker 3: And we can really kind of create this more seamless experience for either health monitoring or Interacting with our digital surroundings.
Speaker 3: So coming out of where we're at now, and kind of where we started, you know, where we started was you have a circuit board kind of rigid, and you sew it onto a garment.
Speaker 3: And we've come a really long way in terms of promoting soft integration, soft electronics.
Speaker 3: And it's.
Speaker 3: To me, what's interesting is balancing the integration of traditional electronics that you expect to perform like electronics with a garment in a soft platform that you still want to perform like a garment or a soft platform.
Speaker 3: And those are two very different things that you have to balance and design.
Speaker 3: So all the money is in data.
Speaker 3: All of it.
Speaker 3: You know, the hardware, the platform in which you collect the data is important, but the value that you're generating is in the data.
Speaker 3: So where you use it and how it's being used is very interesting.
Speaker 3: I think were on the cusp of some really interesting and difficult legal challenges because it begs the question of who owns your data.
Speaker 3: You're the one generating this data.
Speaker 3: So can companies, say, can, for example, can an insurance company use physiological data from your VR headset that it might be collecting or from a wearable that you're collecting?
Speaker 3: And do they have rights to access that data and make decisions for your care based off of that data?
Speaker 3: And that's one.
Speaker 3: That's certainly not my area of expertise.
Speaker 3: I 100% leave that to the lawyers.
Speaker 3: But it is something that we do think about in terms of how we're designing, how much data, how much of the data that you see as a user versus how much data is actually being collected and stored, of which there's a limitless amount of data that we can collect.
Speaker 3: We have sensors and everything.
Speaker 3: They're small, they're ubiquitous.
Speaker 3: So in terms of kind of the sphere of industries interested in it's again, it's applicable anywhere you see fit.
Speaker 3: I remember a few years, a number of years ago, I say a few.
Speaker 3: It's been longer than that now.
Speaker 3: One of our design students who worked in the lab had a really interesting kind of dress idea where it would light up and beat in time with your heartbeat.
Speaker 3: And so it was kind of more of an artistic showing of the sensing that we're capable of.
Speaker 3: But it was this connection of the biotech and the health and the art that I personally found very interesting.
Speaker 3: And I think there's a lot of room for creativity there in the art space as well.
Speaker 3: We are only scratching the surface there.
Speaker 3: I think there is tremendous potential in terms of utilizing older knowledge from historical crafts and techniques like Kirigami, origami, even, you know, traditional knitting and weaving and how you generate color work within those structures.
Speaker 3: There's some really intricate interlacing points there.
Speaker 3: And when I look at that personally, I see, okay, well we've got these really unique opportunities to create some very sophisticated smart systems.
Speaker 3: I don't necessarily know what those look like now at this stage, but going back and kind of touching on that historical framework and that baseline knowledge of how has this been accomplished without the smart technology.
Speaker 3: But then how can we utilize what is done with that to enhance our technology and possibly even create emerging of design and engineering?
Speaker 3: I think these are two worlds that have had some overlap historically, but as we continue moving forward are going to have more and more overlap and need to kind of have this open line of communication between the two fields.
Speaker 3: There's so many barriers.
Speaker 3: We speak very different languages.
Speaker 3: Whether you're a textile engineer, an electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, a designer, an artist, there's, I think we're still learning how to speak each other's languages.
Speaker 3: We may be talking about the same thing and have the same idea, but communicating that to someone else can be really challenging.
Speaker 3: And not just communicating an idea, but communicating the value of the idea can be very challenging.
Speaker 3: I think it absolutely has to be a two way street.
Speaker 3: You know, I think, I can't say for certain in the past, but a lot of times you find that product design follows a particular flow where you identify what it needs to do, you design it and test it and then someone else makes it pretty.
Speaker 3: But then now we're getting to the part where if you can merge and utilize some of these more artistic techniques to enable some of these engineering capabilities, well then it's less of a one directional communication and it needs to be two way.
Speaker 3: So we're kind of having to learn how to relearn how to talk to each other.
Speaker 3: Because designers have a certain perspective that is just as valid and important to hear as the engineer's perspective.
Speaker 3: Because they're the ones who say, well, the weaving machine can do that.
Speaker 3: And of course the engineer is like well, why not?
Speaker 3: But.
Speaker 3: And then kind of teasing out why and then usually you can find a happy medium, but it takes time and it takes both parties being very open and willing to communicate and a lot of creativity to happen.
Speaker 3: When we start developing advanced technology, sustainability and renewability, how we get rid of it is usually not what people think of.
Speaker 3: They're so busy making it and advancing it that we don't often take the time to say, how do you Unmake it.
Speaker 3: And one of the challenges with smart textiles in particular, I think, is the more integrated and seamless this inter our capabilities become between, say, sensors and actuators, these electronic materials with our textiles, the harder it is to separate them out at the end.
Speaker 3: And textiles already has a huge sustainability and circularity challenge in terms of these different fiber blends that we've made and how we recycle and reuse them significantly affects what end applications they can be useful because we're essentially destroying them.
Speaker 3: So then when you take and start adding metals and electronic components, whether or not they're rigid or plastic or elastic, that adds a whole other layer of complexity.
Speaker 3: So there's this consideration that I think kind of needs to happen and that I hope to at least maybe not practice, but at least keep in mind of when you assemble something, have a disassembly plan of, okay, this is integrated in this way, so that way it can be taken out and we can recycle the two pieces separately because they do require different recycling processes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's.
Speaker 3: I think you kind of hit it on the nose when you're talking about modularity in terms of how can we integrate this but still separate it later.
Speaker 3: Reverse engineering, I think, kind of gets a little bit of a bad rep because people think of it as, oh, you're trying to steal my technology.
Speaker 3: When in reality I think it's more of it can be used to generate new ideas precisely like the type you're talking about of say, harvesting the gold particles and things like that.
Speaker 3: We actually did a reverse engineering class a few years ago that we developed.
Speaker 3: I need to teach it again as a small side note, but kind of the whole focus of the class was to be able to disassemble and understand the manufacturing and assembly and design decisions of different complexities of garments.
Speaker 3: So, for example, we started with just a plain sports shirt.
Speaker 3: Nothing smart, nothing fancy.
Speaker 3: It was just wicking.
Speaker 3: And we talked about why it costs, how much it does, how complex is it to make that, and specifically why it's designed the way it is.
Speaker 3: And then we did two other examples where one was a fairly simple smart T shirt.
Speaker 3: It just monitored your heart rate.
Speaker 3: And again, pretty straightforward.
Speaker 3: It was kind of the electronics were attached, again, keep the cost low.
Speaker 3: And then we also did a more higher end, sophisticated, highly integrated.
Speaker 3: And if you think about your standard T shirt, you're looking at maybe four, five pattern pieces.
Speaker 3: This particular shirt at the end of the day had over 68.
Speaker 3: And that's just the fabric pieces.
Speaker 3: So then you start thinking, wow, that's really complex.
Speaker 3: What's your order of operations?
Speaker 3: How do you sew this together?
Speaker 3: And so by disassembling, were able, one, to kind of get a better sense of how it was assembled.
Speaker 3: But then, two, when it comes to disassembly, how difficult is it?
Speaker 3: And then what can we do to streamline both assembly and disassembly?
Speaker 3: I'm a huge music fan, and it's something that I've been very passionate about.
Speaker 3: In fact, we did a demo, a fairly simple embroidery demo, I would say, because the circuit wasn't too complicated.
Speaker 3: But we embroidered a keyboard onto a shirt where you could essentially create, play the shirt.
Speaker 3: So I think in terms of music, you know, there are different ways you could generate music in terms of creating sound from human interaction, whether it's through simple human touch or a sensor.
Speaker 3: I've got a new project now geared a little bit more towards rehabilitation, where it's going to give auditory cues based on how much you're moving.
Speaker 3: So again, the idea that the sensor can detect your range of motion and translate that into something auditory that's a lot easier to process as an end user is really interesting to me.
Speaker 3: Which then, in terms of the art sphere, could you generate your own music while you dance?
Speaker 3: Could you play your own music from your garments?
Speaker 3: How many instruments could you incorporate?
Speaker 3: There's a really cool shirt made by a company called Cute Circuit.
Speaker 3: I don't know that it was ever manufactured on a mass scale, but they did a really cool design case study where they made this shirt for the hearing impaired.
Speaker 3: And what they did was they set up microphones in certain sections of an orchestra on stage.
Speaker 3: And each microphone then was translated to haptic feedback motors or things on a garment.
Speaker 3: So rather than hearing the orchestra, they could feel it.
Speaker 3: So, like, there's a.
Speaker 3: Like I said, you'll have to Google the YouTube video because it's really neat where, like, the violins felt like brushes down the arm, and the bass kind of was a little bit more.
Speaker 3: The drums and the bass were a little bit more in the torso area.
Speaker 3: And to me, that's a whole new way of appreciating not just music for, you know, the auditor, the hard of hearing, but even kind of opening up this new information of how do we interact with the world around us, how do we hear and process data and our senses, how are we utilizing them and processing all of that.
Speaker 3: So some really interesting stuff in the music realm.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So with a lot of my work, we have to be intimately connected.
Speaker 3: With the body, which is very convenient because clothes tend to be intimately connected with the body.
Speaker 3: However, how we put those clothes on and off can affect our sensors.
Speaker 3: So for example, we had this shirt and in order for the sensors to work, you needed a little bit of compression on around the sensor in order to get a good signal.
Speaker 3: And we did a study on, well, putting the shirt on could be very difficult even for an able bodied human.
Speaker 3: And so we ended up integrating a zipper that and cinching ability.
Speaker 3: That way someone who may not have full range of motion or may struggle to put garments on could still put this on without interfering with the sensor performance.
Speaker 3: And it's definitely important to keep in mind anytime you're interacting with the body and keeping in mind bodies that may not move in an expected way and may not behave in an expected standard way.
Speaker 3: So there, like you said, there's just this balance of modularity and different considerations that you have to make.
Speaker 3: And maybe instead of kind of innovating at what I would call like the fiber level, you innovate more at the fabric level.
Speaker 3: And that's one of the beauties of textiles is because of how their material is structured.
Speaker 3: You've got, this is my engineer side coming out, you've got different knobs to turn and you can choose which knobs are most appropriate to play with for the write up per application, so to say.
Speaker 3: So for example, you know, if you're looking at someone who is in a wheelchair, well, you probably don't want, you know, a really constricting garment.
Speaker 3: They're already constricted and they're not going to be able to don and doff garments in probably the same way that you or I could.
Speaker 3: So you want to take that into consideration and maybe not integrate garments or maybe not integrate your sensors in areas that might not get a lot of breathability.
Speaker 3: They may impact pressure and comfort, things of that nature.
Speaker 3: So you might have to choose a different location for your sensor.
Speaker 3: And that requires another study of.
Speaker 3: We want to make sure that our sensor still performs just as well within the new location.
Speaker 3: So that way you still get the quality of data.
Speaker 3: I totally agree.
Speaker 3: The idea of high fashion and these out of the box ideas that we can then distill what works with them into more ubiquitous consumer products.
Speaker 3: In one of the classes in our senior design course for textile engineers, we spend several weeks on idea generation because.
Speaker 3: And one of the tenets that we teach is you really have to think far outside the box for that innovative idea and not just say you're trying to create a new wicking garment for keeping the body cool.
Speaker 3: Well, how does, how do animals keep their bodies cool?
Speaker 3: Let's look to nature.
Speaker 3: How is that done in an industrial setting or in a car setting?
Speaker 3: You have to look outside textiles sometimes to really find those unique creative ideas that you can then kind of take bits and pieces from and distill them down into something that you can then implement into your actual product.
Speaker 3: I get a lot of inspiration from art.
Speaker 3: I get a lot of inspiration from watching people interact in their daily lives.
Speaker 3: How do they move throughout their lives?
Speaker 3: I love to sit in people watch.
Speaker 3: So a little bit less literary focused, but also just thinking about what are the pain points or where do we struggle in our daily lives?
Speaker 3: And you know, at personally where do I struggle in my daily life?
Speaker 3: Where would I want something to be easier or streamlined?
Speaker 3: And could I use a garment to streamline that?
Speaker 3: Could I use a garment or a textile to achieve that?
Speaker 3: One of the movies I think about often is Minority Report where they actually use these gloves to navigate the screen and they kind of have this touch point of how they again, how they interact with the digital and virtual reality that they have the capability of surrounding themselves with.
Speaker 3: So that's kind of like one of those, like could you use your garment to take you from the physical world to the digital world?
Speaker 3: And do you want that too?
Speaker 3: And of course that's a personal preference.
Speaker 3: We'll leave it to each their own.
Speaker 3: But I think the interesting question is, can you provide that capability?
Speaker 3: So I think it's very interesting to kind of just get the inspiration from art, you know, some of those crazy sci films.
Speaker 3: And you're like, hey, that's a neat idea.
Speaker 3: I wonder if we could actually do that where.
Speaker 3: And then you just again kind of distill that down into something that you can accomplish with today's technology while setting yourself up for succeeding in the future and building off of it.
Speaker 3: There's a hot top.
Speaker 3: There's a bit of a hot debate among.
Speaker 3: I've seen it in some academic areas of are we multidisciplinary, Are we interdisciplinary, Are we intra disciplinary, Are we extra disciplinary like.
Speaker 3: But to me, I really think we're in this space of needing to find this balance of specialization and understanding how novelty works, but then understanding how you can broadly apply that.
Speaker 3: There's this book I read a while ago called Range, you know, how Generalists Succeed in a Specialized World.
Speaker 3: And I think it's really enlightening to think about, well, how at the generalist kind of knows A surface level, you have to be able to trust the people who know the nuances and the details of very specific areas of technology.
Speaker 3: And so I think that's where gifts getting.
Speaker 3: Forming the right team is going to be the key to success for any project, any development.
Speaker 3: And that right team, you need your specialists.
Speaker 3: So that might be your traditional textile workers or your farmers, your chemists and your biotechnologists who understand how the recycling process works.
Speaker 3: But then at the end of the day, you also need someone who can understand each of those specialists, help translate that and also find the similarities.
Speaker 3: So I think both skill sets are needed, and I'm not entirely sure that there's a good word for that yet.
Speaker 3: Providing those different perspectives and voices, you know, really lends that understanding to multi interdisciplinary world that we live in.
Speaker 3: Whether or not you're designing in the physical world or in the virtual world, because your fabric properties, your material properties influence drape.
Speaker 3: And what's to me is interesting, you know, regarding virtual draping to sustainability right now, we've kind of hit on several times fashion development and product development is very unsustainable.
Speaker 3: You use a lot of materials and physical materials to go back and forth on like very small design nuances and tweaks to get something just right in term.
Speaker 3: And especially with draping, fit, accessibility, those types of modifications.
Speaker 3: And that can be both a very time consuming and physical, like material consuming process.
Speaker 3: By transitioning to this virtual platform, we would eliminate a lot of that.
Speaker 3: The challenge being is how do we get the drape accurately simulated?
Speaker 3: And that is extremely challenging just because of the nature of textiles and how the different threads interact with each other.
Speaker 3: And how they do that is going to depend on thread hairiness.
Speaker 3: I mean a multitude of variables.
Speaker 3: Hairiness, thickness, material type, knit structure, weave structure, weight.
Speaker 3: And it kind of goes on and on and on.
Speaker 3: So a lot of the simulation and drape and fabric right now has actually been led by graphical designers and specifically for like video games or cgi.
Speaker 3: But those aren't necessarily based on actual fabric physical properties.
Speaker 3: Those are more based off of what you visually see as a fabric behaving, as opposed to the simulation that occurs in say, an engineering field where you input specific numerical parameters and generate a simulation based on the mathematical equations that are beholden to it.
Speaker 3: The challenge with textiles is that is incredibly computationally expensive.
Speaker 3: I crashed a lot of computers, my poor computer in grad school.
Speaker 3: And so thinking about how can you transition that not just from the fashion side, where I think we've got a pretty good sense of how we can translate the drape properties and measure, kind of generalize and bulk fabric properties in order to get the mostly accurate drape.
Speaker 3: But then how do we take that one step further to then do the engineering and the technical optimization that is possible?
Speaker 3: And that, I think, is a really key area that no one has really been able to crack yet.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of effort that would need to happen because in order to implement this to a machine learning model or an AI model, you need data.
Speaker 3: But in order to get data, you have to do the physical testing.
Speaker 3: So that way you have that data.
Speaker 3: So some of the larger companies and manufacturers that maybe do quality control on their products for the fabrics that they make would likely have the best success if they open up that data access, make the data accessible to machine learning.
Speaker 3: And then it's also not just the amount of data, but also understanding the relationship between the variables.
Speaker 3: We've got a good sense of kind of those equations and correlations to some extent, but they're pretty isolated and they also tend to be pretty unique towards a very specific type of material.
Speaker 3: So, like, it might this behavior or this equation might only work for fabrics with a high elastic content, whereas then if you've got woven, that's just cotton, you're going to have to use a totally different equation.
Speaker 3: And so kind of taking all those decisions and nuances, like I said, I think it's pretty well suited for an AI model or machine learning model.
Speaker 3: It's just on the human side, we have to identify what those models are first.
Speaker 3: And by models, I mean the correlations.
Speaker 3: And two, have data to learn from.
Speaker 3: No small feat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: No, that's so interesting because I'm curious, like, how many, like, businesses are doing stuff that are like, that have relevant data, but we wouldn't know to ask or like that.
Speaker 2: That's so interesting.
Speaker 2: Also thinking about data sustainability.
Speaker 2: But then it's, you know, it's like, oh, this would help everyone.
Speaker 2: Not everyone should have access.
Speaker 2: I mean, conundrums.
Speaker 2: We're in kind of.
Speaker 2: I feel like this time period is one of like two truths, you know, usually.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 3: And, you know, I think, like I said, I really like your idea of kind of bringing different perspectives together because we all have our own industrial truth, so to say, like, I view the industry in a particular light, whereas a fashion designer, you could ask the same question and they would give you totally different answers.
Speaker 3: And who's to say which one of us is right?
Speaker 3: Odds are neither of us are but that's kind of just the reality that we live in.
Speaker 3: But the more voices that we can include, the better understanding we're going to have and the better decisions we can make moving forward.
Speaker 1: So that was Amanda Mills and Evie evolution.
Speaker 1: And now for the news.
Speaker 4: Nearly 1 million North Carolinians could see their premiums soar if a health insurance transcript credit program expires at the end of the year.
Speaker 4: The enhanced transcript credits put a ceiling on insurance premiums for people depending on their income, and it's been at the heart of the government shutdown.
Speaker 4: As Democrats argue the credits need to stay in place for people who get coverage through the Affordable Care act marketplace.
Speaker 4: Research from the center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds premiums will double in 2026 if the program expires.
Speaker 4: Gideon Lukens with the center notes open enrollment started on Saturday and people are already shopping, seeing plans without the cost, capping enhancements and deciding they can't afford coverage.
Speaker 5: Even if transcript credits are eventually extended, every day that goes by without an extension means more people dropping coverage and ending up uninsured.
Speaker 4: Next year, premium increases will be higher in North Carolina than the national average.
Speaker 4: For example, the center estimates a 60 year old couple making $85,000 a year in the state will see their premiums go from about $7,200 a year to more than 32,000.
Speaker 4: Lukens explains the enhancements began in 2021 and led to a major rise in ACA Marketplace enrollment, from about 12 million that year to more than 24 million in 2025.
Speaker 5: Some of the biggest coverage gains came for people with lower incomes who for the first time became eligible for zero dollar out of pocket premiums.
Speaker 5: And a lot of those enrollment gains unfortunately, will be lost if the extension does not come into being this year.
Speaker 4: The Congressional Budget Office estimates about 3.8 million people across the country will be uninsured by 2035 if the enhancements are not extended.
Speaker 4: For North Carolina News Service, I'm Eric transcript off Find our Trust indicators at Public News Service.
Speaker 1: This has been Eye on the triangle from WKNC 88.1 FM HD1 raleigh.
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