Communications of the ACM
Bridging Sensory Gap Between Artificial and Real Skin
This prosthetic hand equipped with the proposed prosthetic skin is used just like an actual hand to cuddle a baby doll. The prosthetic skin shows soft mechanical properties, multimodal sensing capabilities, and warmth corresponding to that of the human bo
Credit: Dae-Hyeong Kim et al
An international team of researchers have developed a polymer designed to mimic the elastic and high-resolution sensory capabilities of real skin. The material is a stretchable prosthetic skin equipped with ultrathin single crystalline silicon nanoribbon (SiNR) strain, pressure, and temperature sensor arrays.
"SiNR mechanical and temperature sensor arrays integrated with stretchable humidity sensors and thermal actuators enable high sensitivity, wide detection ranges and mechanical durability for prosthetic systems," the researchers say.
Although stretchable sensing materials have been under development for some time, this is "the most sensitive material yet, with as many as 400 sensors per square millimeter," writes Technology Review's David Talbot. He notes the researchers "used motion-capture cameras to study how a real hand moves and stretches, and then applied varying silicon shapes to different spots on the prosthetic skin to accommodate that stretchability."
The researchers demonstrated that the prosthetic hand and laminated electronic skin could enable complex operations such as hand-shaking, keyboard-tapping, ball-grasping, holding a cup of a hot/cold drink, touching dry/wet surfaces, and human-to-human contact.
From Phys.Org
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