Wearables are getting smarter every year, but most of them still rely heavily on a nearby smartphone to do the actual thinking. This addiction may not last much longer.
Researchers at Tsinghua University and Peking University have now developed a flexible AI chip that is thinner than a human hair and can be folded thousands of times.
Dubbed FLEXI, the chip could enable future wearables to run artificial intelligence independently without constantly offloading data to a phone or the cloud.
Inside the chip that bends without breaking
What sets FLEXI apart is not only its computing power, but also its physical form. According to the research paper, it is made of a thin plastic film and consists of low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) circuits made on a flexible base.
Because the entire system sits on this flexible surface, the chip can be bent, stretched, twisted, or even crumpled without damaging the embedded AI circuitry. This makes it well suited for wearables such as smart patches or health monitors that need to adapt closely to the human body.
To test its durability, the team tested FLEXI through extreme stress experiments. The chip withstood more than 40,000 bending cycles and folding to a radius of just 1 mm without any loss of performance.
FLEXI also delivered strong results in the practical test. Health monitoring detected irregular heartbeats with 99.2% accuracy and tracked daily activities such as walking and cycling with 97.4% accuracy.
The chip also proved to be extremely efficient, using less than 1% of the energy that traditional chips use. Additionally, TechXplore reports that this flexible chip will cost less than $1 per unit if mass produced.
This flexible AI chip could transform what wearables can do
The researchers say their next step is to integrate more sensors into the chip and further increase its complexity to bring flexible AI wearables closer to everyday use.
Beyond medical applications, chips like FLEXI could power audio wearables that process sound and voice commands independently, or lightweight AR glasses that process images and gestures without a phone.
They could also advance broader mobile and wireless technology, where engineers are already exploring innovation. These include ideas like chips that use controlled surface vibrations to make future phones thinner and faster, as well as approaches to improving cooling and performance in synthetic diamond devices that could benefit next-generation hardware.
