Image credit – Sam Yoon/Korea University
At the moment the majority of wearables that we have at the moment are designed to resemble watches, in which we have the main display and a strap that goes around the wrist, which is pretty much the only “bendable” part of the device, although it’s probably safe to say that the Samsung Gear Fit series is one of the more bendy devices we’ve seen so far.
That being said one of the reasons for the lack of more bendable wearables is that do we really need a device that wraps all the way around our wrists? And secondly, more than just the display itself needs to be flexible, like its circuit board, its battery, sensors, and so on. However it seems that researchers at the University of Illinois and the Korea University might have come up with something in the form of nano film.
The nano film is both bendable and flexible, not to mention cheap to produce and conductive with electricity, all of which could lead to thinner and more bendable wearables. To top things off, it seems that the film is also capable of retaining its properties after repeated cycles of stretching and bending, meaning that it will be strong enough for the daily rigours of life.
According to Sam Yoon, a professor of mechanical engineering at Korea University, he claims that this new nano film “establishes world-record combination of high transparency and low electrical resistance, the latter at least 10-fold greater than the previous existing record.”
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