CHICAGO, Illinois – August 11, 2011 - You no longer have to look like a Star Trek Borg to wear skin-mounted electronics. A team of scientists and engineers at the University of Illinois has developed a “smart skin” that can be used to connect wearers to the cyber-world as easily as sticking on a temporary tattoo.
The smart skin can monitor your heart rate or brain waves, for example, or detect the electrical activity in muscle contractions and send the signals to a computer, without stick-on electrodes, bulky wires, conductive gels, tape, or skin-penetrating pins.
Just a few centimeters wide and thinner than a human hair, the smart skin could make monitoring people’s physiological status more comfortable and more accurate than using electrodes because it stays stuck to the skin and doesn’t interfere with the wearer’s movement, the researchers say.
“Wires and patches are not the best way to do things,” said John Rogers, a professor of material science and engineering at the University of Illinois, who led the research.
Rogers and his team used tiny, flexible wires comparable to those in silicone circuits, and see-through silicone to make a fine mesh circuit that can stick on with water. It bends, wrinkles and stretches with the skin. It detects what’s happening underneath the surface and sends signals to a computer.
These “wearable electronics” are described in the August 12 issue of the journal Science.
Imagine video gaming with just a temporary tattoo and your voice. By wearing the smart skin on your throat, Rogers said, the patch can read the electrical activity of the muscle contractions when you say “up,” “down,” “left,” or “right” and send the command to the game.
The uses for the product in the health field are more compelling. As with a video game, people could use the smart skin to send commands to a prosthetic device, Rogers said. It could help develop new and less cumbersome technology to aid people who cannot speak.
Smart skin patches could make it easier to monitor newborn babies or people with sleep disorders because they are gentler than stick-on, point-contact electrodes and you can’t feel them, said Rogers.
“There might also be a use for the smart skin in physical rehabilitation,” Rogers added. “You can imagine... a device that laminates onto a portion of muscle that is atrophied or onto a wound site and can electrically stimulate muscle contraction,” he said.
