Wearable electronic skin that can store,send and receive data

 Electronic Skin: Store ,send and receive data

 

Develop an artificial skin is one of the major challenge. And we are almost achieved the goal by nanotechnology. A wearable synthetic skin that can sense touch , temperature , movement and can response to it. Now we moved little bit ahead with a wearable skin which can store, send and receive data, Nature published the success in their latest edition .

 

The application of this technology is very vast. The initial target is to  use  this synthetic skin with data  to aid patients with movement disabilities. The new improved version of skin can store data, drug, it can receive diagnostic information and can release drug, monitor movement, temperature and send data. The so called 'electronic skin' is a 0.3 mm thick 4 cm long and 2 cm wide stretchable nanomaterial.

 

The trade-off for that memory milestone is that the device works only if it is connected to a power supply and data transmitter, both of which need to be made similarly compact and flexible before the prototype can be used routinely in patients. Although some commercially available components, such as lithium batteries and radio-frequency identification tags, can do this work, they are too rigid for the soft-as-skin brand of electronic device. Even though the data is transmitted  wirelessly, there should be a device that can read the data. The thought of using human body temperature or electric charge is also a thinkable approach to solve the energy requirement.

The electronic skin can also do things that conventional medical sensors cannot. When placed on the throat, for example, it senses spoken words well enough to control a simple computer game. The device might be used to help people with laryngeal diseases communicate, to monitor premature babies, or to enhance the control of prosthetics. Use the skin to induce muscle contractions in regions of the body that have degenerated.

 

More scientific reads :

http://www.nature.com/news/electronic-skin-equipped-with-memory-1.14952

http://news.discovery.com/tech/nanotechnology/electronic-skin-patch-could-treat-diseases-140401.htm