E-Skin Offers Exciting Future For Biology

Electronic skin or e-skin mimics human skin in strength, stretchability, and sensitivity to temperature and touch that could be further used to collect biological data in real-time.

This would enhance its role in next-generation prosthetics, personalized medicine, soft robotics, and artificial intelligence.

‘Electronic skin or e-skin mimics human skin in strength, stretchability, and sensitivity that could be further used to collect biological data in real-time. This technology can further open doors for a world where one could monitor the inanimate objects� structural health of, such as furniture and aircraft.’

The use of 2D sensors in the e-skin enables them to be integrated as atomically thin, mechanically strong materials yet being functionally shifting at a spectacular pace.

The New Future of e-Skin:

The durable artificial e-skin is created using a hydrogel reinforced with silica nanoparticles as a strong and stretchy substrate and a 2D titanium carbide MXene as the sensing layer, bound together with highly conductive nanowires.

As hydrogels comprise 70% water, they are close mimic to human skin tissues. The e-skin can resist almost 5,000 deformations and recover in about a quarter of a second each time. It could also sense objects from 20 centimeters away, respond to stimuli in less than one-tenth of a second, and when used as a pressure sensor, could distinguish handwriting written upon it.

Such dynamics can help them monitor a range of biological information, such as changes in blood pressure, which can be detected from vibrations in the arteries to movements of large limbs and joints. This data can then be shared and stored on the cloud via Wi-Fi for further analysis.

"We envisage a future for this technology beyond biology. Stretchable sensor tape could one day monitor the structural health of inanimate objects, such as furniture and aircraft", says KAUST postdoc, Yichen Cai.

Source: Medindia