Sptangdex II - This Time It's Medical

You may recall my previous idea of Sptangdex which went into very little detail as to how it worked. Further thought on the matter has led to more details on this. And yes, it's potentially pervy still, but it also has genuinely non-sexual applications, including medical ones, and as we all know, sexual desire is an engine for technological progress.

This is a smart textile based on much bigger than nanotechnology. It's based on a fibre which is able to alternate between locking itself in position and moving itself over a wide range of angles in three dimensions. The fibre consists of segmented units each able to respond to a signal which will instruct them to adopt one of four states, along with intermediate conditions. These are: passive (behave like an ordinary textile); mimic (copy the positions of the adjacent fibres); locked (adopt a specific orientation and maintain it) and active (move to a specific three dimensional orientation). There are states between these extremes. The entire fibre is coated in an elastane layer. Each unit can be programmed individually and corresponds to a specific address on the fibre. When woven together the fibres add a segment address according to their position in the cloth. It can be controlled by being addressed with an electromagnetic signal comprising the number of the fibre unit in the garment, with the segment address, and the state it is to adopt: passive, mimic, locked or active. Each of these is also given a number representing the tendency to be in a particular state and locked and active state instructions take two further arguments indicating the angle. These are similar to CPU opcodes, with passive as binary 00, mimic as 01, locked as 10 and active as 11. These opcodes are followed by two eight bit values describing the latitude and longitude of the next unit in terms of a ball and socket joint between the links. They can also return their angular even if passive

When woven into a garment with conventional textile used for the weft, the smart fibres constitute an address space of around 400 megalocations, each of which can both store and recall its current state. This can be used to correct posture and train the wearer in movement, and the resistance also allows the wearer to increase muscle strength and enables it to be used as a splint. However, the garment can also be hacked to control the clothing and therefore also the wearer (which is the pervy bit but security measures could make it less hackable). Each unit only responds if it receives its address - they are called by name, as it were, meaning that some parts of a sheet are active and others passive.

This has a number of uses. The passive return of information gives detailed data on the posture and position of the wearer. An elderly or infirm person who has been in the same position for a long time can have an alarm to alert emergency services. Pressure sores and compartment syndrome caused by casts can be prevented. Posture can be improved. Dancing, aerobics, Tai Chi, Yoga, Pilates and other movements can be taught through muscle memory. There is a remote control and sensor involved which can read data on posture and movement and aid that movement through something like labanotation.

The cloth is powered by temperature differentials and movement and shares the power among its units along each fibre.

Note that this is not nanotechnology. The size of each unit is around a hundred microns in diameter. It consists of a gimbal combined with sensors to record position, a battery, a central wire along which surplus power can be sent, a contractile socket to lock the segment, a thermocouple, piezoelectric crystals, a transmitter, a receiver and a processing unit similar to a CPU with a small instruction set.