It all started in a coffee room at the university when Edwin Jager, Professor of Applied Physics, saw a leaflet about other LiU researchers looking for participants for their studies on touch and the sense of touch. Until that moment, he had been unaware of any research groups at the university who, like himself, were interested in how we get information about the world around us through touch. This may involve human touch or a mobile phone signalling through silent vibration. Another word for this is haptics.
The connection to his own research interest was clear. But the researchers behind the leaflet had a medical perspective that aroused his curiosity. Edwin Jager contacted the research team, who told him about Sarah McIntyre.
“I have a background in psychology, and I research touch sensation. A few years ago, I stumbled upon haptics. It’s a highly multidisciplinary field at the crossroads of engineering, design, neuroscience and sensory science. So, when Edwin showed up and told me about the amazing textiles that can contract and exert pressure on the skin, I felt that we had to do something together,” says Sarah McIntyre, researcher at the Center for Social and Affective Neuroscience, CSAN, at LiU.
And they did. They recently received SEK 30 million in grants from the Swedish Research Council for a new interdisciplinary research environment where researchers from many different areas – from textile science to pain research – together will explore whether artificial touch through innovative textiles can alleviate pain.
“The idea that touch can alleviate pain is very old. But we still don’t know what mechanisms of the nervous system are involved and how it works. Nor do we know how to optimise touch or other interventions to actually treat pain, so that’s what we’ll be exploring in this project,” says Sarah McIntyre.
Effective treatments are lacking
In the project, the researchers focus on long-term pain, which has lasted longer than three months. The World Health Organization classifies such pain as a disease in its own right. However, it is difficult to treat.
“We have very few treatments for people who suffer from long-term pain. Today’s drugs are not very effective over time. They can cause side effects or in the longer term make the pain worse,” says Sarah McIntyre.
And this is where artificial touch – without human skin contact – comes into the picture. Recently, research has indicated that it may be possible to achieve a pain-relieving effect by artificially activating the sense of touch. One way of doing this could be through the kind of textiles that Edwin Jager and his colleagues are developing. These textiles can contract and exert pressure on the skin, and are known as actuating textiles. They could be an alternative or complement to drug treatment.
One advantage of textile materials is that they can cover and thus touch large parts of the body. If such “smart textiles” are designed as a garment, they can become a part of the person’s everyday life and hence easier to use.
Eight years ago, Edwin Jager’s research group, together with textile researchers at the Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås, showed how a regular thread coated with conductive polymers can be made to contract or stretch when stimulated by electrical voltage. The news received great attention and added an important piece of the puzzle to the possibility of creating “textile muscles”. Weaving together many such threads into a fabric increases the power. In a recently completed project, the researchers have demonstrated that a sleeve with this kind of textile muscles woven into the fabric can produce a pressure similar to the touch of a hand.
“First and foremost, we want to investigate how touch can reduce pain. We can develop the technology to study this in a systematic way, where the touch is applied to well-defined areas of the body and where we know exactly how much pressure is applied and how often. If this works, we can develop a garment and test the effect on patients with long-term pain,” says Edwin Jager.
Interdisciplinary collaboration
The research project will run for six years, until 2030, and is based on collaboration between several different subject areas. Edwin Jager is the project manager and contributes with expertise in materials science and actuating textiles. Sarah McIntyre and Håkan Olausson are neurophysiology researchers and will investigate the nervous system mechanisms for pain relief through touch. Nazdar Ghafouri at Region Östergötland contributes with expertise in pain medicine. Nils-Krister Persson at the Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås, develops methods for producing textiles with the right properties, while Jonas Stålhand at the Department of Management and Engineering is responsible for biomechanical modelling of the smart actuating textiles and their interaction with the skin.
“There are research questions that would be impossible to address if we only stayed within one specific subject area. It’s long been the case that an individual researcher or a single research lab cannot know everything about a subject. It has become increasingly important for researchers to talk across subject boundaries and to use each other’s skills and knowledge,” says Sarah McIntyre.
For Edwin Jager, the attraction lies in developing new things that, through collaborations with others, can be useful:
“It’s more fun when the materials we develop have a clear application in real life. Seeing that what we do can be used for something good, as in medicine, makes the research much more interesting.”
