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Skin-inspired Electronics

  • 1. Background

    Electronic skin or e-skin are devices that mimic the tactile sensing functionalities of human skin, which have a variety of exciting potential applications such as touch sensitive prosthesis and robotics with human-like functionalities (humanoids). E-skin can also be used as wearable electronics, which are generally used to detect various information coming from the body such as pulse, temperature, respiration, and body motion, through which continuous health monitoring is possible. All of these applications have a tremendous potential for growth in the coming years.

  • 2. Current Issues

    Enabling the aforementioned applications possess a great deal of challenges. Firstly, all of the devices require sensors that need to convert external physical stimuli (e.g. pressure, strain, slip, bending, and temperature) into electrical signal. It is critical that these sensors have high degree of sensitivity and specificity (i.e. selective sensitivity to one form of stimulus over other stimuli). The sensor should also have appropriate sensing range, minimum hysteretic behavior, and have linear response to mechanical stimuli. In addition, these sensors need to have sufficient spatial and temporal response. Furthermore, the sensors should be reproducible and have long durability.
    Another challenging aspect is appropriate tuning of the devices’ mechanical properties. Because the devices are made to mimic or interact with the human body, which are soft, stretchable, and non-planar by nature, the devices must also have similar characteristics.

  • 3. Our Approach

    Our research group is focused on the fabrication of intrinsically stretchable e-skin with similar mechanical properties with that of human skin. To further enhance the sensing performance (sensitivity, specificity, sensing range, hysteresis, linearity, response/recovery time, and spatial resolution and uniformity etc.), we have engineered novel device architectures with the use of various materials (e.g. carbon nanotubes, conductive polymers, and hydrogels) with tunable properties. Our goal is not only to mimic the properties of human skin, but also to go beyond to enable super-human sensing capability.