$12 million team flexes its muscles

The science fiction of the 1970s TV program Six Million Dollar Man is just around the corner with the development of wearable muscles by Australian electrochemists, scientists at the international conference Connect 2005 were told.

Prof Gordon Wallace of Wollongong University is in the field of electronic textiles and the team he is part of has won $12 million in funding from the Australian Research Council to establish a Centre of Excellence in Electromaterials Science.

His research has created the basis for new electronic textiles - that is, novel fibre made from flexible plastics that conduct and store electricity.

The fibres also expand and contract in response to an electrical current. The fibres are embedded with carbon atoms for added strength, but are highly flexible and could be woven together into other materials.

Prof Wallace and a team of scientists, including Dr Tim Scott of North Shore Hospital, plan to use these fibres to create a prototype glove containing wear-able artificial muscles for hand injury rehabilitation.

Another innovation the team is exploring is wearable clothing that stores energy like a battery that can be used as a power source to run electrical appliances, like a laptop computer. The team has also received funding from the US Army Research Office to help develop clothing for soldiers that can store energy.

Prof Wallace says the fibres have myriad applications, only limited by the imagination. "Every time we present this work to a general scientific audience, new, sometimes fascinating, ideas are encountered.

"At the biomolecular level we intend that such fibres will eventually find use as implants guiding nerve cell growth and assisting in spinal cord regeneration - a project being pursued in collaboration with Prof Graeme Clark's Bionic Ear Institute."