Electrified artificial skin made of strange orange jelly can tell when you are touching it and can heal itself. It could someday be used in prosthetics or to cover robots so that they can聽sense their surroundings.
Many different types of 鈥渆-skin鈥� devices have been made that can be bent, stretched or attached to a person鈥檚 skin to generate power or detect their heart rate, for example. But these devices tend to be limited because they can usually only be made in flat sheets and only attach to flat surfaces, says Kyeongwoon Chung at the Korea Institute of Materials Science in South Korea.
Chung and his colleagues made an e-skin that can be 3D printed into any shape. They made rings, pyramids and a sort of cap that can fit over a finger, and Chung says that it would be possible to make a face mask out of it.
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The e-skin is made out of an orange, jelly-like substance composed mainly of water and acrylic acid. The gel contains both positively charged and negatively charged particles, so when it is cut or ripped those particles attract one another and it heals itself.
It can also detect if you touch it, even very lightly. When a weak electric field is applied to the e-skin using a pair of wires, a touch from a finger or any other object that conducts electricity makes current flow through the gel. The difference in the intensity of that current at each of the wires makes it simple to calculate the exact point on the e-skin that is being touched.
This sort of e-skin could be used on robots to help them sense environments, says Zhenan Bao at Stanford University in California. Chung says it might have even more far-reaching applications in medical sensing, where it could potentially be used as a coating on prosthetic limbs.
ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces
