Ultra-thin e-skin could lead to advances in medicine, cool wearable computing (video)

DNP eskin

Remember the names Martin Kaltenbrunner and Takao Someya -- that way, you'll have someone to blame when kids start pointing and laughing at gadgets we consider high-tech today. Leading a team of University of Tokyo researchers, they have recently developed a flexible, skin-like material that can detect pressure while also being virtually indestructible. Think of the possibilities: with a thickness of one nanometer, this could be used to create a second skin that can monitor your vital signs or medical implants that you can barely feel, if at all. Also, temperature sensors could be added to make life-like skin for prosthetics... or even robots! Like other similar studies, however, the researchers have a long journey ahead before we see this super-thin material in medicine. Since it could lead to bendy gadgets and wearable electronics first, don't be surprised if your children call iPhones "so 2013" in the not-too-distant future.

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Via: iO9, ABC Science, New Scientist

Source: Nature

Plastic skin lights up on contact, may lead to touchscreens everywhere (video)

Plastic OLED skin lights up on contact

Flexible circuitry is frequently a one-way affair -- we've seen bendy displays and touch layers, but rarely both in one surface. UC Berkeley is at last merging those two technologies through a plastic skin whose display reacts to touch. By curing a polymer on top of a silicon wafer, the school's researchers found that they could unite a grid of pressure sensors with an OLED screen; they just had to remove the polymer to create a flexible skin. As the film-like material can be laminated on just about anything, it maylead to touch displays in places where they were previously impractical, or even very thin blood pressure sensors. It could also be easy to produce -- since the skins use off-the-shelf chip manufacturing techniques, commercial products are well within reach.

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Via: Phys.org

Source: UC Berkeley

Researchers say new development could give artificial skin a wider range of senses

Researchers say new development could give artificial skin a wider range of senses

We've seen a number of efforts to build a better artificial skin, or "e-skin," over the years, and a team of researchers from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology now say they've made a breakthrough that could lead to some of the most sensitive e-skin yet. The key development is a new type of flexible sensor that would not only allow the artificial skin to detect touch, but humidity and temperature as well. Those sensors are comprised of gold-based nanoparticles that are just five to eight nanometers in diameter and laid on top of a substrate -- in their research, the scientists used PET, the type of plastic you'd normally find in soda bottles. That substrate conducts electricity differently depending on the way it is bent, which means researchers can adjust its sensitivity just by increasing its thickness. As you might expect, this is all still in the early stages, but the researchers see plenty of possibilities for the future, from bringing a sense of touch to artificial limbs to using the same technology to monitor stress on bridges.

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Via: PhysOrg

Source: American Technion Society