Electronic Skin that Responds to Touch Stimulus

The ability of human skin to perceive the sensation of touch sets off a signal to the brain that allows us to understand the physical world we live in.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley in a team led by Associate Professor Ali Javey in the department of electrical engineering and computer science have developed an electronic skin structure that has been designed to respond to the sensation of touch.

The e-skin technology has been developed using a thin polymer layer which has then been placed over a silicon wafer.  

Fabrication of a pressure-sensitive thin polymer film that behaves as a transistor gives the advantage of fast response times, high stability and low power consumption. In the current research, the team have fabricated a polymer film onto a semiconducting layer with an integrated sensor network in a vertical fashion to help create the pressure-sensitive electronic skin.

Using a silicon compound with conducting polymers helps to amplify the capacitance change in response to compression making this technology key to future applications including its use in health monitoring kits (e.g., via the enhancement of pulse wave monitoring) to help keep an eye on blood pressure and pulse rate for remote diagnostics.

It is quite fascinating to see that this electronic skin lights up in response to a touch stimulus. An intriguing quality to this technology reflects the ability of this system to manipulate the brightness of light generated in response to the degree of pressure applied to its structure.

Light-emitting diodes that are monolithically integrated over this single plastic user-interactive electronic skin structure allow the technology to emit light in response to touch.

The light emitted is in red, green and blue pixels in response to activation of these diodes locally at the superficial layer of the network, which is similar to what you would see with human skin where the mechanoreceptors that reside in the dermal and epidermal layers of human skin respond to the sensation of pressure, vibration and texture.

This technology demonstrates the growing demand to integrate sensor systems into cheap plastics, creating a cost-effective process for manufacturers and for mass scale commercialization.

The thin layer of electronic skin can also be wrapped around objects and this really does create a new opportunity to use this platform for the advancement of human-machine interface systems.

For years scientist have continued to redesign and enhance robots for human interaction, though one of the main challenges here has been being able to make a robot built for human use as tactile as possible to generate a human-like response to physical stimuli.

Advancements such as this electronic skin could soon make this possible and bring us closer to working with robots in a social environment.

References

• Paper-thin e-skin responds to touch, holds promise for sensory robotics and interactive environments.
• Wang C, et al. User-interactive electronic skin for instantaneous pressure visualization. Natural Materials. doi:10.1038/nmat3711.
• Schwartz G, et al. Flexible polymer transistors with high pressure sensitivity for application in electronic skin and health monitoring. Nature Communications. doi:10.1038/ncomms2832. 

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