Coming Soon: Clothes That Record Speech

Yoel Fink, a materials-science professor at MIT, has invented a new type of fiber that can detect and produce sound--potentially opening the way for shirts that are also microphones or voice recorders, or tiny fibers which could measure your vitals.

Fink has long thought that we should be able to demand a lot more from the fibers in our clothes. So for a decade, his lab has been developing fibers that can interact with their environment. His newest creation, with Shunji Egusa, Noémie...