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Pursuing prosthetic electronic skin

Nature Materials volume 15, pages 937–950 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Skin plays an important role in mediating our interactions with the world. Recreating the properties of skin using electronic devices could have profound implications for prosthetics and medicine. The pursuit of artificial skin has inspired innovations in materials to imitate skin's unique characteristics, including mechanical durability and stretchability, biodegradability, and the ability to measure a diversity of complex sensations over large areas. New materials and fabrication strategies are being developed to make mechanically compliant and multifunctional skin-like electronics, and improve brain/machine interfaces that enable transmission of the skin's signals into the body. This Review will cover materials and devices designed for mimicking the skin's ability to sense and generate biomimetic signals.

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Figure 1: Skin receptors and transduction process.
Figure 2: Strategies for imparting stretchability to electronic devices.
Figure 3: Devices for transducing sensory stimuli in skin.
Figure 4: Readout electronics design that may be used for collecting and converting biomimetic data.
Figure 5: Sensor and circuit designs for signal readout and addressing.
Figure 6: Emerging technologies with potential for interfacing nervous systems with information from prosthetic electronic skin.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support from Samsung Electronics, the MSIP (Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning), Korea, under the IT Consilience Creative Program (grant NIPA-2014-H0201-14-1001) supervised by the National IT Industry Promotion Agency and Air Force Office of Scientific Research (grant no. FA9550-15-1-0106).

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  1. Alex Chortos and Jia Liu: These authors contributed equally to this work

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  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, 94305, California, USA

    Alex Chortos

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, 94305, California, USA

    Jia Liu & Zhenan Bao

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A.C., J.L. and Z.B. co-wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Zhenan Bao.

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Chortos, A., Liu, J. & Bao, Z. Pursuing prosthetic electronic skin. Nature Mater 15, 937–950 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4671

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4671

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