Scientists have invented a new type of electronic skin that can “communicate directly with the brain”, allowing amputees to experience a human-like sense of touch through prosthetics. This new type of digital skin “E-skin”, invented by scientists, is able to provide pleasant and painful sensations to the brain with the help of temperature, pressure and voltage sensors.

The revolutionary artificial skin is equipped with sensors for temperature, pressure and voltage, which are converted into electrical signals – similar to how nerve impulses communicate with the brain, reports the British edition of the Independent.

An electronic circuit that is portable, called a monolithic electronic skin, was developed by a team at Stanford University, who detailed their discovery in a study published in the journal Science.

Stanford University’s Zhenan Bao, who was one of the study’s lead authors, told The Independent that the advanced technology could also be used to sense objects and sensations while remotely controlling a robotic limb.

“We have been working on a monolithic electron shell for some time,” Professor Bao said.

“The challenge was not so much to find mechanisms to mimic the wonderful sensory abilities of human touch, but to bring them together using only skin-like materials,” Bao added.

Digital skin – e-skin – as thin as a sheet of paper, capable of imitating human skin

Weichen Wang, a graduate student in Bao’s lab, added, “Mostly, this challenge boils down to improving skin-like electronic materials so that they can be incorporated into integrated circuits with sufficient complexity to generate neural impulses and low operating voltages. sufficient for safe use on the human body.”

The paper-thick prototype electronic skin is the first to combine all the desired electrical and mechanical characteristics of human skin in a soft and durable form.

The team now plans to scale up the technology and develop an implantable chip that will enable wireless communication through the body’s peripheral nerves.

Other recent e-skin research has focused on robotics to give robots sensory feedback and physical self-awareness.

Earlier this year, a team from the University of Edinburgh unveiled a device that provides a sense of perception “similar to that of humans and animals,” the Independent reported.

A separate study in 2023 by engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) unveiled another type of artificial skin capable of detecting toxic chemicals, which could allow robots to detect everything from pollution in rivers to nerve agents and biological hazards.