Researchers at Stanford University developed a soft electronic skin that can generate nerve-like impulses that communicate with the brain. The single, multilayer, stretchable material can sense pressure, temperature, strain, and more, just like real skin. The researchers hope that those signals might be directed to implanted wireless communication chips in the peripheral nerve to allow people with amputations to control prosthetic limbs.
While previous efforts required rigid electronics to convert the sensed signal into electrical pulses that the brain can read, the researchers at Stanford University have produced soft integrated circuits that convert sensed pressure or temperature to electrical signals similar to the nerve impulses to communicate with the brain.
“We’ve been working on a monolithic e-skin for some time. The hurdle was not so much finding mechanisms to mimic the remarkable sensory abilities of human touch, but bringing them together using only skin-like materials,” said Zhenan Bao, PhD, the K.K. Lee professor in chemical engineering and senior author of the study about the development.
“Much of that challenge came down to advancing the skin-like electronic materials so that they can be incorporated into integrated circuits with sufficient complexity to generate nerve-like pulse trains and low enough operating voltage to be used safely on the human body,” said Weichen Wang, a doctoral candidate in Bao’s lab, who is a first author of the paper. Wang has been working on this prototype for three years.
The goal was a soft integrated circuit that could mimic the mechanism of sensory receptors and run efficiently at a low voltage. Wang’s first attempts demanded 30 or more volts and could not realize enough circuit functionality. “This new e-skin runs on just five volts and can detect stimuli similar to real skin,” he said.
Artificial skin will be critical to new-age prosthetic limbs that not only restore movement and functions, like grasping, but also provide sensory feedback that helps the user control the device with precision. Not only that but the sensory-skin material itself must stretch and return without fail, time and time again, all while never losing its nerve-like electrical characteristics.
The team invented a tri-layer dielectric structure that helped increase the mobility of electrical charge carriers by 30 times compared to a single-layer dielectrics, allowing the circuits to operate at low voltage. One of the layers in the tri-layer is nitrile, the same rubber that is used in surgical gloves. Most of the e-skin is made of many layers of skin-like materials. Integrated in each layer are networks of organic nanostructures that transmit electrical signals even when stretched. These networks can be engineered to sense pressure, temperature, strain, and chemicals.
Each sensory input has its own integrated circuit. Then all the various sensory layers must be sandwiched together into a single monolithic material that does not delaminate, tear, or lose electrical function.
Each electronic layer is just a few tens to hundred nanometers thick and the finished material of half a dozen or so layers is less than a micron.
“But that’s actually too thin to be handled easily, so we use a substrate to support it, which brings our e-skin to about 25-50 microns thick—about the thickness of a sheet of paper,” Bao said. “It is in a similar thickness range of the outer layer of human skin.”
Editor’s note: This story was adapted from materials provided by Stanford University.
The study, “Neuromorphic sensorimotor loop embodied by monolithically integrated, low-voltage, soft e-skin,” was published in Science.
