“Scientific American”
Human skin is flexible and stretchable, and contains millions of nerve endings responsible for the sensation of heat and touch, making it a great tool for exploring and interacting with the outside world.
Over the past forty years, engineers have worked to produce a synthetic version of it with these capabilities, but their attempts have always been unable to reach a version that matches human skin in its ability to perform several functions and its ability to adapt.
These failures did not prevent the emergence of new research that enriches previous research efforts with more capabilities, and gives them more complexity, which brings this field closer to reaching its goal of manufacturing electronic skin, which has multiple uses, from covering robots to its employment. There are hopes that these devices will one day enable humans to control robots remotely and feel what these robots are monitoring.
The first version of these devices was designed in the mid-1980s, and scientists in one of those arrays used the kapton chip, a flexible, but non-stretchable membrane that was invented in the 1960s to rest on its surface an array of infrared sensors and sensors.
These capabilities were very primitive compared to the capabilities of biological skin, however, the first decade of this century witnessed a development in the quality of materials and available electrons, which became softer and more flexible, but also became stretchable, and this is the most important, as it allowed researchers to combine sensors and new electronics To create an integrated skin system, which contains a layer that resembles real skin in terms of flexibility and extensibility, as well as being equipped with a power source, sensors of various types, and pathways to send information from these devices to a central processor.
Touch and temperature sensors were the first parts to be used in this type of skin system, and Wei Zhao, a biomedical engineer at Caltech, decided to try to combine these devices with others that might detect chemicals.
Zhao’s research team was able to manufacture skins that can identify explosives and nerve gases, which are used in chemical warfare, as well as viruses such as “SARS-Cove-2”. Moreover, the researchers added to these skins previously developed pressure and heat sensors, similar to leather The electronic product is in the form of a transparent adhesive bandage with metal shapes on top.
With regard to the commercial uses of electronic skin, the activation of such uses is contingent upon solving some of the problems involved in this skin in its initial existing form, and Zhao refers to the issue of durability as one of these important problems, and says that there are many developments, and scientists have become Very close to what they want, but there are challenges in the electronic leather industry.
