A new electronic skin can feel the raspy texture of sandpaper, the beat of someone’s pulse and even heat. But there’s more. It also can detect sound.
This rubbery plastic-and-carbon film mimics the structure of human skin, reports Hyunhyub Ko and his team in the October 30 Science Advances.
It’s the first time anyone has demonstrated an e-skin that can sense so many different types of stimuli, says Alex Chortos. “That’s the innovative and impressive part of this work,” points out this materials scientist. He works at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.
Chortos is part of a team that developed another pressure-sensing e-skin. It can relay signals directly to brain cells, based on tests with cells that had been isolated from a mouse. Those cells got the skin’s message, too. They became more or less active depending on how hard researchers pushed on the skin. These researchers described their advance October 16 in Science.
Such work offers a blueprint for scientists to actually “bridge electronics with biology,” says Wenlong Cheng. He’s a chemical engineer at Australia’s Monash University in Clayton, Victoria.
